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Objects? Unidentified aerial phenomena. Are they secret weapons being tested by our own or foreign governments? The American people are becoming most interested and in many instances, very alarmed by the UFO story. So why do you suppose that all of this has been kept from the world? Exploring our past, our future, and the mysteries of our universe. Where do they come from? Why can't you explain it? Everybody in ufology is screaming for disclosure. The future is now. This is Micah Hanks from the high mountains of Appalachia in a bunker below ground. Welcome, one and all. It is the Micah Hanks program, glad as always to be getting into gear and going in pursuit of the anomalous in our existence, as we do every week. Listen on demand via podcasting apps everywhere and courtesy, of course, of our friends at the on X radio network. Welcome, everyone. And this week, in addition to our customary analysis of UAP and the enigmas in our world, we're also celebrating a bit of an anniversary, because this week marks the 50th anniversary, half a century since we sent the Viking probe to Mars, an event that remains very controversial for reasons we're going to get into here in a moment. But in a statement released by NASA this week, they noted that throughout history, Mars has been in sight, but never within reach. Until July 20, 1976, when NASA's Viking 1 lander touched down safely and began transmitting the first images from the surface of the Red planet. And it wasn't alone, by the way, because within just a few weeks. Viking 2, its twin, arrived on September 3, 1976. As NASA explains, each of the landers was paired with an orbiter that ferried them to the planet and then remained aloft for. For several years. They gathered unprecedented data and breathtaking images of Mars in detail that still evokes awe and wonder today. The landers on opposite sides of the planet dug their sample arms into the ground, unearthing the first clues about Mars and the potential for life there. So as of Monday, July 20, we recognize 50 years since that quite literally groundbreaking mission, because the Viking probes were scooping up soil there on the red planet and studying it in case there might be some form of life there. And therein, my friends, lies the great controversy. You know, there was an excellent article about this over@space.com by the veteran space reporter Leonard David, and he asked that question yet again. Did the Viking landers actually detect life on Mars in 1976? Only for the evidence to be misunderstood. Now, if you haven't been following this story for the last half century, you may Be asking, well, why are we asking about whether life was discovered on Mars 50 years ago? Don't you think we would know by now? So why in the world is Leonard David asking that question? Well, this is actually a very relevant question because there has been an ongoing debate about the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers and what they may or may not have discovered while performing biological experiments there on the Martian surface. You got to keep in mind each carried three life detection experiments. Okay, There was the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, which was designed to search for organic molecules. And of course, that was probably going to be the clearest indication of life that we would find. But there was another biological experiment. This was called the Labeled Release Experiment, developed by Gilbert Levin. And intriguingly, it did produce results that were consistent with microbial metabolism. Yes, you heard that right. The results were consistent with microbial metabolism. Just let that sink in for a moment. But of course, it was the failure of that earlier experiment, the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, that didn't detect any organic compounds that caused most people to conclude that Viking hadn't found any evidence of life. This is the most obvious place we're going to find it. And therefore we assume based on the failure of that test, that life wasn't found, when in fact the other aforementioned biological experiment did find information. It wasn't conclusive evidence, but it certainly was consistent with microbial metabolism. So in Leonard's article there@space.com, i've got that linked in the show notes for you. He talks to a lot of different experts about this. For instance, he talks with Ben Clark, a member of the Viking science team from back in the day. And Clark says that while the two biological experiments were largely negative, he does concede that the LR experiment produced exactly the kind of response scientists had anticipated at the time if microorganisms had been present. So based on that, many would be asking, well then what's the question? Did we find life or not? Why are people still disputing that? Well, there are, of course, the skeptics too, who argued that reactive minerals in the Martian soil might have produced similar chemical reactions without there needing to be biology present. In fact, I think in more recent rover samples, there have been microbial like characteristics determined in soil samples that clearly are not indications of life. And so some had said this might have just been minerals back in the day, not Martians. But pushing back on those skeptics a bit, Clark also notes that Vikings experiments may have overlooked possible Martian metabolisms. By failing to supply hydrogen gas as a nutrient. And that's significant because modern microbiology has actually shown that some terrestrial microbes here on Earth do derive energy using hydrogen and sulfate. And so that raises the possibility that Vikings experimental design may have just been incomplete. All. Although in truth, there had been hydrogen available elsewhere on the spacecraft, but it was being used. Yes, you guessed it. By that first experiment, the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer. Hopefully we won't reference that mouthful again, but going forward, if we do, it's just going to be the gcms. Okay. But yes, that earlier experiment actually did allocate a certain amount of hydrogen. So they had it, but they were using it on the experiment that they thought was most likely going to help them find life instead of the one that may actually have done so. But then Clark goes a little further with this, talking with David in the Space.com article, because as I already alluded, Clark also notes that there are some of the modern rovers. We have perseverance and curiosity up there, and they actually have detected organic molecules and geological features on Mars, including what are known as reduction spots, which some researchers think might actually be potential biosignatures. In other words, evidence is there in the Martian terrain of life that either does exist or at very least at one point did. And frankly, as far as the search for life beyond Earth, it wouldn't really matter if we find living organisms right now, or if we found evidence of past life on Mars. It would settle the question of whether we have been alone in the universe. If we knew that life had existed on Mars at any time. It would be a game changer, right? Of course, it would be more intriguing if we found live Martian life there today. But there's also this entirely separate question about whether the landers that we have sent to the Red planet might have unintentionally been contaminated with earthly microbes that might have actually survived the journey to the Red planet. And so one day, when we eventually do send crude missions with human astronauts up there to the Red Planet, we may find microbes, but they may not be Martians. They may be Earthlings. As you can see, this stuff gets pretty complicated. So somebody else, though, that Leonard David talks with in his article is astrobiochemist Steven Benner. And even more so than Clark, he argues really forcefully that Viking results were fundamentally misinterpreted. In fact, he's got a book coming out about this. I believe it's got a great title. Get this, Meet the Neighbors, Life on Mars and how to Find it. Might have to reach out to Mr. Benner, but he essentially says that Viking actually likely did detect a sparse population of what he calls autotrophic microorganisms, perhaps on the order of 1000 cells per gram of soil, comparable to extremely inhospitable environments on Earth. You know, the kinds of places where the extremophiles lurk. We had a couple of articles about that recently there@thedebrief.org for anybody out there who'd like to catch up on their extremophile reading. But according to Steven Benner, he says that the scientific community's reliance on that GCMS test, remember the long one I told you I wasn't going to read off again? He said that essentially our reliance on those test results to dismiss the positive biological experiments created a flawed consensus that persisted for decades. According to Benner, once the GCMS interpretation became questionable, particularly after later discoveries that percolate in Martian soil can destroy organic molecules during heating, the biological evidence deserved renewed consideration. Now to get off on a bit of a tangent here, but a related one when Benner's talking about the way that essentially initial early misinterpretation of the data caused decades of ongoing misinterpretations and interpretations that continue today, all of which Benner says are extremely questionable, especially considering how much actual data supported the idea that there was life on Mars way back in the 1970s. Well, very similar to that idea. I have to mention that again, the UFO subject, you look back at the Project Blue Book years, you look at all the very compelling case files that were investigated, military encounters, observations by scientists, police officers, observations by professionals in all walks of life, and in some cases, accompanied by some pretty good data. I've mentioned the Minot Air Force Base incident from back in the late 1960s, where there was radar scope data and of course, multiple eyewitnesses describing observing this very unusual craft, giving very vivid descriptions of the object. And yet, despite that data provided to Blue Book investigators, Major Hector Quintanilla at Project Blue Book, who led the effort there at the time, concluded that this was ball lightning and a bunch of people looking at the planet Jupiter. And those kind of knee jerk conclusions were pretty customary for Project Blue Book in the years right before it winded down. But of course, the death knell for the entire thing had been the University of Colorado project led by Edward Condon. That project, of course, determined that while there were some unresolved cases and that there were some pretty good ones that the Condon Committee, as it was called, could not identify the cause behind. Nonetheless, they said, there's no real reason why the military should be studying this stuff. And once that determination came out, essentially Project Blue Book shut down. The American media responded as if there is literally nothing to the UFO story. And that attitude essentially predominated for decades, very much like what we're hearing about with the Viking lander. The initial interpretation, according to some, that there may have been support for the existence of microbial life in Martian soil samples, but they were misinterpreted early on and that led to a stigmatization which has persisted until modern times. So now we have astrobiochemists like Stephen Benner and others who are saying, look, maybe we do have some neighbors nearby. And we misinterpreted that data. I've often said in the search for alien life, wouldn't it be a tragedy if we had the data right here? Whether it comes in the form of UFO sightings or in the form of microbial evidence found by The Viking Lander 50 years ago, the evidence was right in front of our eyes. But because we didn't know how to interpret it, we haven't acknowledged the real life existence of life on other worlds. So ultimately, the question of whether Viking discovered life on Mars remains unresolved. But after decades of new discoveries, including the detection of organic molecules in more recent explorations on Mars, and now we have a better understanding of Martian soil chemistry, and we've got advances in microbiology, all sorts of things happening, this has prompted many researchers to revisit Viking's results with fresh eyes. And some are saying, look, the evidence actually may be there in hand, or at very least in a robotic hand that made its way to Mars. Really quickly, before we shift our attention over into some more modern analysis of UAP reports and why the United States Defense Intelligence Agency got back into the UAP game and started asking the kinds of questions that Edward Condon and the Colorado Project back in the 1960s had said, really, the military doesn't need to be worried about this. Well, there was a small group of intelligence analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency a few years ago who decided it was very much in the US national security interest to figure out what UAP are and to learn everything we can about them, especially one particular incident that occurred in 2004 out there over the Pacific waters off the California coast, or on that to follow. But here and now, I want to also give a shout out to my good pal Austin Burgess, one of our excellent contributors there at the debrief, and also the only other local contributor. He lives right here in Asheville. And so on rare occasions these days, we're able to hang out with my crazy schedule. I've worked through the last eight or so weekends. It's been an extremely busy summer. And of course, this weekend I'll be in Toronto at the Annual Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies eventually. But I bring up Austin here because he had a very intriguing article he wrote for us there at the debrief that argues that some of the most promising locations in the search for alien life, and more specifically those enigmatic alien megastructures known as Dyson spheres, may not be the places where astronomers have been looking yet again. It seems we are in another case here where the absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence. And as Austin outlines in the article, I'll have linked in the show notes, there is a new article that appeared on the Arxiv Preprint server that suggests that one of the coldest objects in a stellar system could in principle be an artificial megastructure rather than a natural astronomical object. This according to Amir Nizam Amiri, a physicist at the University of Arkansas who explored the question of Dyson spheres by modeling these hypothetical megastructures around two often overlooked types of stars, red M dwarfs and white dwarfs. And according to Amiri, he says there's a very good chance that we may have just been looking for these megastructures in the wrong places, and, in fact, astronomers might be able to detect them if they start looking in the right areas. Specifically, he says, both red dwarves and white dwarves are dim enough that the infrared heat emitted by a Dyson swarm would stand out more clearly against that star's own light. Very intriguing possibility. And so 50 years after we first sent Viking up there to Mars, keeping with that theme here in this opening segment, we're still looking for evidence of life. But again, I have to ask, what if that evidence is right here in hand, or at very least it's right under our nose and we're just not looking in the right places? Or we are ignoring things that we think are unlikely to be evidence of extraterrestrials, when in fact there may be some clues to this broader cosmic mystery that we're simply not looking at in the right way. When we come back, we're going to shift our attention over to the research that was undertaken by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies as the primary contractors for the Defense Intelligence Agency's Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program. Documents related to that effort have been leaked online in recent years. We've actually covered that before in the past here on the program. But taking a deeper look at exactly what the Defense Intelligence Agency was collecting in terms of historical data about UAP trends that emerge and then how they use that famous incident from 2004 involving the USS Nimitz carrier strike group out there off the California coast as the basis for a deep investigation into the implications but also the applications of UAP technology to the US Military and of course, the future of science. It makes for very interesting discussion and that's going to be a conversation we will dive into when we return right here in a moment on the Micah Hanks program. On November 14, 2004, Carrier Strike Group 11 steamed through the clear waters roughly 80 nautical miles west of San Diego beneath cloudless California skies. At its center was the nuclear powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, accompanied by an escort of warships that included the guided missile cruiser USS Princeton. For weeks, the strike group had been conducting an intense series of pre deployment exercises designed to prepare its crews for an overseas deployment that many aboard expected would take them to the Persian Gulf. The world beyond the horizon weighed heavily on the minds of the sailors and aviators aboard the ships. Less than two weeks earlier, George W. Bush had secured a second term as President of the United States. Across the globe, American forces were engaged in fierce urban combat during the Second Battle of Fallujah, one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Iraq war. For the young men and women assigned to the Nimitz, there was every reason to believe they would soon be joining that conflict. Welcome back. Among those on board the Nimitz had been Commander David Fravor, a veteran naval aviator and newly appointed commanding officer of strike fighter squadron 41, the storied black Aces. Only weeks earlier, he had assumed command of the squadron, whose lineage stretched from Corsairs over the Pacific During World War II to F4 Phantoms in Vietnam, F14 tomcats over Iraq and Afghanistan, and now the Navy's newest strike fighter, the twin seat F A 18F Super Hornet. On this morning, Fravor and his fellow aircrew expected nothing more than another routine workup, a carefully scripted mock air battle intended to sharpen the skills of pilots, radar controllers and the crews directing the exercise from the Princeton. Everything about the day suggested another uneventful training mission. And yet for nearly a week, operators deep inside the command information center aboard the Princeton had been watching something they could not explain. Repeatedly, their powerful AN Spy 1 radar had detected unknown objects descending from altitudes above 60,000ft to just above the ocean's surface in a matter of seconds before vanishing again. Initially dismissed as equipment anomalies, the contacts refused to disappear. Day after day they returned, exhibiting flight characteristics that seasoned radar operators struggled to reconcile with anything they had encountered before. And on the morning of November 14th, those two worlds, the meticulously choreographed routine of a Navy training exercise, and the unexplained radar contacts that had quietly puzzled the Princeton's crew for days were about to collide. None of the pilots climbing into their Super Hornets that morning had any reason to suspect that what began as a standard training sortie would become one of the most closely scrutinized military aviation encounters in modern history. Shortly, we'll be discussing that in much greater detail. But this landmark case, known today as the Nimitz UAP incident, forms a significant part of a once secret document that was leaked online some time ago. Titled Summary Report on Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies UAP Analysis Capabilities, this document, dated November 23, 2010, provides a brief summary analysis of the characteristics that Bass found to be most commonly associated with uap. And of course, it also provides a lengthy analysis, perhaps one of the most historically significant, involving the famous 2004 Tic Tac incident. But it's also within the 140 pages or so of this technical summary of Bass's analytical capabilities that we learn a lot about the intention behind the Defense Intelligence Agency's interest in UAP at that time, their hopes of applying computational, investigative and data analysis infrastructure that Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or bass, had developed under its contract. Known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program, the TIC TAC encounter serves primarily as a representative, a kind of sentinel case used to illustrate all those analytical methods. And because of that, many analysts still consider it one of the best cases in all history. Despite the fact that some officials in Washington right now, including one former director of the Pentagon's All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, think they've finally solved the Nimitz mystery. We'll get there as well. But first, sticking with this Bass document from back in November 2010. To quote from the Executive summary, they note that the purpose of this report is to summarize the field data collection in house databases and computational capabilities that currently reside at Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies for the Study of Advanced aerospace technology. Between 2008 and 2010, Bass was contracted by the Defense Warning Office of the Defense Intelligence Agency to create, staff and equip, a new organization in order to examine and analyze the threat to national security associated with Advanced Aerospace technology. By selecting and modeling a few sentinel cases of encounters with advanced aerospace technology, this report demonstrates the in house data collection, data storage and analysis resources built by BAS Under DIA Contract HH M400208C0072 in other words known as the OCEP program. Well, at this point, the Executive Summary portion of this report goes on to explain that reports of unexplained aerial phenomena, variously referred to also as anomalous aerospace vehicles or simply good old fashioned UFOs, have been recorded throughout history, as we all know, describing luminous objects and craft exhibiting a wide range of shapes and unusual flight characteristics, including rapid acceleration, hovering and abrupt maneuvers that can be difficult to reconcile with conventional aerodynamics. And while many such observations are ultimately attributable to natural phenomena or maybe also advanced human made technology, in some instances there are still a small residuum that remain unexplained. So according to the investigators at Bass, government investigations conducted between the late 1940s and 1970 examine many of those reports. Although critics have argued that much of the research lacked scientific rigor, since then limited funding has left UAP research largely to amateur investigators, and so civilian and military pilots have continued to report encounters, some corroborated by radar, some including incidents near U.S. nuclear weapons facilities. And yes, that also includes the Minot Air Force Base incident that we mentioned earlier. Reports also describe unidentified submerged objects or USOs displaying these so called trans medium capabilities with extraordinary underwater performance without detectable turbulence or cavitation. If all this is accurate, of course, such cases would have to have implications for national security, wouldn't they? And very different from the old determinations from the 1960s by the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado. They would warrant continued scientific investigation. This is a problem we should be taking seriously, don't we think? Picking up again and quoting directly from the executive summary in the BAS report, the authors note that BASS is a research organization focused on the identification, evaluation and acquisition of novel and emerging future technologies worldwide as they specifically relate to air and spacecraft. Cutting edge research areas include propulsion systems, space applications of nanosensors, piezoelectric and nanowire fabrics, human performance, plasma stealth technologies, and directed high energy weapons. BASS was contracted to the Defense intelligence agency in 2008 to investigate and analyze the possibility of a credible threat posed by UAPs. To accomplish this mission, Bass over the past two years has focused on developing three separate resources, each unique to the study of UAP, and those resources are one to obtain the most comprehensive suite of portable field sensors and personnel available two to build the most all inclusive database of UAP performance capabilities and behavior in the world and three to acquire world class computational methodology for analysis of UAP data. This report, they note, touches on all aspects of these resources, but concentrates on the in house computational capabilities. But now, intriguingly they also note, Bass acquired the ANSYS Multiphysics Finite Element Analysis program for a first of a kind engineering and physics in house resource devoted to providing a scientifically sound mathematical analysis and modeling of UAP behavior. Thus, Bass has acquired significant computational capability to convert field data into mathematical models and three dimensional simulations. So if you've hung with me this far, in essence what they're saying is that based on all that information, the report from which I'm quoting here provides theory and analytical and numerical solutions for a selected number of UAP and USO incidents that Bass studied. And that of course in particular includes what they call a Sentinel incident where FA18 aircraft from a United States carrier strike group were vectored to a nearby unidentified contact in November 2004 and will provide a complete accounting along with some rather obscure details about that case that are less often discussed here shortly. But first, I think it warrants mention that before they get to the lengthy analysis of the Nimitz incident, there's a comprehensive overview of the UAP or UFO phenomenon that's provided. And rather than advocating a specific explanation for what they think UFOs are, essentially, bass argues that some reports describe performance characteristics sufficiently unusual to justify engineering analysis. That's essentially all they say. They also concede that a lot of sightings probably are attributable to conventional causes, but yet again, that there's a small subset that remains unexplained and merits further investigation. That's really kind of been the resounding chorus for most of ufology for the last several decades. And so in this overview that it provides, the Bass researchers look at the historical background of UFO investigations over the decades, Bass's own organizational capabilities. They also look at a classification system for reported UAP types. And then of course they get into the engineering analyses of selected cases, along with some summary and conclusions. I should also note that in addition to what you can read in these documents, which as I mentioned have been leaked online, they've been available for a long time now, and you can find them usually on Reddit and other places. But the series of books now, there are several that have been published by James Lekatsky, the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program. Those books by Lekatsky offer a pretty comprehensive overview that at times can get a little technical, but in my own reading experience, not too much, especially for people who already have a pretty good working knowledge of propulsion systems and the kinds of science and technology that are most directly applicable to UAP phenomena. Yes, in those books, Lekatsky provides a pretty good overview. So anybody who's interested in really seeing exactly what kinds of things they were looking at again, I would recommend those books to you if you haven't read them already. But for the here and now, just to kind of summarize briefly some of those areas of focus, the kinds of applications for future aerospace technologies. Some of the things Bass was looking at at the time included propulsion, lift, power generation capabilities, the kinds of materials that might be associated with UAP signature reduction capabilities exhibited by these craft. Also, human factors involved in the UAP experience, which as you can imagine, ranges from simply the human sensory suite that every human has at their disposal and how these things apply during a UFO sighting. But even beyond that, we could also apply this to some of the more intuitive aspects of the UAP experience, as reported by some observers. More discussion about that, perhaps another time. Directed energy is also discussed. Advanced control systems, space applications related to UAP, and a few other things. And interestingly, the company Bass frames UAP research as one pathway toward identifying potentially disruptive future aerospace technologies. In other words, if we can study these things, even if we can't grab one, bring it to Earth, put it in a lab and study it, if we can figure out the kinds of things that are driving these UAP and essentially replicate that here on Earth without actually acquiring one and reverse engineering it directly, we might be able to advance our understanding of space technologies and propulsion. A whole range of different things. There may be weapons systems applications too, and hence of course, the name of the program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program, begins to make more sense, doesn't it? Now, another component that warrants mention, which of course we have discussed here on this program with the man who designed the database I'm about to name involves what was called as Project Capella. And Capella was the centralized UAP database that was created by Jacques Vallee for the ALL SAP program. It actually was the combination of several existing major databases that included the original civilian investigation launched by Bob Iglo back in the 1990s, called the National Institute for Discovery Science. Also Project Blue Book Records, Mutual UFO Network or MUFON Records. Dominique Weinstein's pilot reports were also collected. But then we also had cases from Brazil, and these had to do with the so called Project Colaris. We had a collection of Canadian files on UAP as well as UK files. We also had data that have been collected out there at the infamous Skim Walker Ranch. And then finally, original investigations conducted during that 2008-2010 timeframe by Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Studies itself. But even beyond just building this elaborate database, Jacques Vallee and of course also Eric Davis that examined what they called a six layer model involving physical anti physical, psychological, physiological, psychic and cultural aspects of the UAP experience. As you can see, this was a pretty elaborate investigation and at times it dipped into the esoteric and all this of course was being applied to ongoing reports from over the decades of disks, spheres, cylinders, triangles, cigars, bells and ellipsoids seen in our skies. But of those several UAP types mentioned there, one in particular, I suppose this might involve what we'd call cigars or ellipsoids, but more popularly known today as Tic Tacs. Yes, a very serious military encounter involving that particular type of UAP became the Bass Sentinel case. And we're going to analyze that in depth when we return here in a moment, as well as look at a possible proposed explanation for the incident when we return here on the Micah Hanks program. What was causing the unusual radar contacts detected by the USS Princeton back in November of 2004 out off the California coast? Whatever those objects were that perplexed the personnel on board the Princeton prompted a attempt at intercepting one of these objects, and the resulting visual encounter reported by a couple of F A18 Super Hornet pilots remains one of history's best. We'll be looking at that in a moment. First, I do want to remind you, of course, if you aren't already an ex subscriber, you are missing out. You've got a lot of listening to get caught up on, and for just $7 a month or $77 a year, that gets you direct access to the entire back catalog of the Micah Hanks program, as well as every weekly additional edition, the X podcast, as it's known, and the monthly Enigmas special. And keep in mind also, of course you get all of those and this show ad free on your own special RSS feed that you can subscribe to on your favorite podcasting app. We prefer Apple, but you can use a variety of different ones to listen. But you get all your shows in one place ad free. That's a really, really good value for just $7 a month. So consider supporting the ongoing efforts of your friendly neighborhood podcaster who never hardly takes a day Off Goodness, you can probably hear it in my weathered voice. But enough for now. Maybe that'll make for some good narration as we now dive into one of history's best cases. While the Nimitz carrier strike group was conducting pre deployment training exercises off Southern California back In November of 2004, as we now know, operators aboard the Aegis Cruiser USS Princeton began observing repeated unidentified radar contacts. Now, a few specifics about these, and one in particular, in my opinion, is really going to be important for this discussion. A little later. The first thing we need to keep in mind, as has been widely reported, because this case has gotten a lot of attention, especially since 2017, but of course, the famous footage of the alleged Tic Tac filmed by pilot Chad Underwood had already been leaked online. That had been available online. It wasn't a classified video and so many already knew about this story even prior to 2017. One of the reasons for that had been that another former fighter pilot named Paco Chi had written about this on his website. He knew Dave Fravor. And it seems also pretty evident that Mr. Chi had probably had access to some of the original DIA investigative documents that later were released online. The first one, an executive summary report on the Tic Tac incident that was released by George Knapp back in, I believe, 2018. But it seems very evident, based on comparing Paco Church's original article and that report that was later revealed by George Knapp, that Paco probably had had access to that. But he certainly says in the article that he knew David Fravor very well, and that's of course, how he initially came to learn of this story. And so he told the entire thing in an article that appeared online years before the whole modern UFO renaissance. So this story was actually already out there. People knew it. And this aspect that I'm going to focus on here also was known at that time that these objects, when they were initially detected, and we're talking days before the actual intercept attempt, where Commander Fraver and his wingman, even though it was a woman, Alex Dietrich, and their weapon systems officers, or wizos, went out there and tried to intercept this object. Days before all that, the operators of the radar, the AN SPY one on board the USS Princeton, had been detecting these objects. And they said that these things would appear at about 60,000ft and they would drop extremely quickly through the field being monitored by the electromagnetic frequencies going out in all directions from the an spy1 radar. Now, why is that significant? Okay, 60,000ft is a high enough altitude that conventional aircraft don't fly up there, balloons can reach that altitude? Yes. Spy aircraft can reach that altitude? Yes. Of course, we also send balloons to higher altitudes, around 90,000ft. But the important point here is that that 60,000ft boundary is essentially the limit of what they were monitoring on the radar frequencies. And these objects would appear at that boundary, dropping very quickly through that, and descend over a course of just a couple of seconds to about 50ft above the ocean, where they would stop and they would hover, whatever these objects were. And so the important takeaways here are the A, these objects appeared to have been originating from some altitude above 60,000ft, way up there in the atmosphere, where very few aircraft are going to be operating. And whatever these things are, they're dropping from that higher unknown origin point down through the 60, 60,000 boundary all the way down to about 50ft above the ocean, then they stop, they hover. And then after stopping and hovering for a few seconds or minutes, then they would take off and they would exhibit additional unusual characteristics in terms of their flight dynamics. After stopping and lingering like this, occasionally they would also shoot back up, climb back up to high altitude and vanish that way. So these returns had been observed for several days by personnel aboard the Princeton. And so on November 14, because the anomalous tracks continued to appear, there had been this training exercise that was taking place that morning. And the Princeton personnel decided to use that training mission as an opportunity to try and identify one of these contacts visually. Specifically the senior chief who had been on board the Princeton at the time. And this is a guy who was a 17 year veteran. In fact, his name is redacted from a lot of the documents, but certain documents, including the Bass report in question, they do name this individual in that document. His name's out there in the wild, therefore. But I won't name him here. But in any case, the senior chief on board the Princeton had been very worried because these objects that he was watching, based on his experience over almost two decades, were most consistent with ballistic missiles. And in fact, the Princeton's radar system at that time was not set up really to track ballistic missiles because they weren't expecting to encounter any out there off the California coast. And it has been hypothesized that if they had actually had it set up for such tracking capabilities, in that instance, they might have been able to follow these objects a little better. Well, given the inherent limitation that they were facing in light of this, on the morning of November 14, 2004, we had a couple of F A 18 F Super Hornets flying around out There doing this mock combat routine with Commander Dave Fravor leading the operations. He'd just taken over VFA 41, otherwise known as the Black Aces, earlier that year, and he would hold that position until his retirement a couple of years later. But by this time, Commander Fravor, a Top Gun graduate, had close to 3,500 hours in the sky. Most of even the very best pilots never attained that much flight time. And so to say that Dave Fravor is an extremely skilled pilot would have been an understatement. And so at about 9:30 local California time, as they were wrapping up the first round of exercises, an unidentified woman's voice suddenly screams across the radio. And they hear this woman asking if they're carrying ordinance out there, these FA18 pilots. And Fravor responds, well, I've got a cat of nine. This, by the way, is in reference to one of those unarmed warheads, but which has the tracking capabilities. Those are the ones that are colored blue, and it's hanging out there under his wing. So he is not carrying weapons. But then this woman's voice comes back across the radio from the Princeton, and now she is directing the F A 18s out there to this new destination somewhere off the Baja California coast. And so all the pilots, especially Alex Dietrich, wingman for Dave Fravor, in this instance, they were rather perplexed. Dietrich remembered that she was a little concerned because she could sense the urgency in this woman's voice when she came across the radio. And so our intrepid FA18 Super Hornet pilots have now just received their real world tasking and they leave the simulated exercise to go out there and investigate whatever this thing is. But at that time, they said, you know, it's probably drug runners. So they were all really excited. They expected to see a light aircraft flying along, trying to sneak in there and bring drugs into the United States. Now, The F A18 Super Hornet pilots were not the only ones who were contacted. There was also a Marine pilot, Commander Douglas Kurth, who had been out there participating that day. He also was vectored to the general location, and he flew over the area about the time that The F A 18 Super Hornets were arriving on the scene. And he flew by in time to see this kind of rolling disturbance down there on the surface of the water, but he never got close enough to see what was causing it. The Princeton also contacted an E2C Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft that was operating, which essentially had been the control aircraft for the F A 18s during the military exercise that day. And so the Princeton was trying to give them the coordinates and see if they could find this object on their radars from the E2C hawkeye. And although they did find a trace, they said it was so light, so insignificant, that they almost thought it was a wave. And so, after trying to convey this information to the hawkeye, and after already vectoring Douglas Kurth after this location, the operators on the Princeton take control of the conversation and directly communicate with the F A 18 Super Hornets, who, as we've already heard, are now on their way out there to find out what this object is, too. So as Fravor is approaching and his wingman, they proceed toward the assigned intercept point. And while descending through roughly 20,000 to 24,000ft, they then observe that same disturbed patch of ocean that Douglas Kurth had seen. But unlike Douglas Kurth, who had only seen the disturbance on the surface of the ocean, now Fravor flies in close enough, and he sees this unusual airborne object above it. And his description, of course, is famous. He said it was white, oblong, it was smooth. He said it was about 40ft long, roughly about the same length as his aircraft. But there were no wings. There weren't any rotors. He didn't see any exhaust coming from this thing. In fact, there was nothing that indicated any kind of propulsion system. The object seemed to just be there, hovering, but not staying still. He said it was moving really erratically over this disturbed area of water. So while pilot Alex Dietrich and her weapon systems officer maintain a holding pattern up high, Fravord begins to descend in a spiraling turn so he can get in close and try and see what this thing is. And as he approaches, he says the object essentially reacted to his movements, initially beginning to climb toward him. Then it mirrors aspects of his maneuver, he said, then accelerated away before he could close the distance and get close enough to really get a good look at this object. Fravor at that time believed the object demonstrated awareness of his aircraft based on, again, the way it climbed toward him, mirrored aspects of his own maneuver, and then shot off. And then, after briefly climbing, the object departed at extremely high speed. Now, at this point, and this has always been a sticking point in the story, Radar controllers aboard the Princeton then informed Fravor that they had the target again. But now it had appeared near the previously assigned Combat air patrol, or CAP, station, approximately 60 miles away. Now, why is that significant? Because that CAP point, as it's known, had been the previously assigned location that the aircraft for the training exercise that day, the F.A18s, in this case, had been using, and they were only discussing this over encrypted communication channels. So nobody outside of those members of the Nimitz battle group communicating over the radios that day as part of this exercise would have known the location of that cat point. But according to the operators on the Princeton, who were, of course, interviewed years later by DIA personnel, and then a summary of their investigation appears in the Bass report that was leaked some time ago, along with these considerations for what this technology might be and what this might all mean. Yes, the UAP or the TIC tacs, apparently knowledge of the cap point and what the radar operators on board the Princeton interpreted as being its appearance, again, on radar at that location had been conveyed to those investigators at that time. And this really does beg the question, had this UAP been playing cat and mouse? Did it exhibit awareness? Was it trying to communicate that it knew what they were doing and it could demonstrate that it had an awareness of what was being undertaken during this training exercise? In other words, had whomever was operating the TIC Tac been trying to communicate nonverbally, hey, I'm listening to you. I know what you're doing. I'm going to show you. By going and sitting at your cat point for a minute, almost kind of taunting the F A 18s and everybody else involved in that training that day, we won't ever probably know. But in truth, it's probably also better not to speculate because since this story came out publicly, I have seen a lot of people focus on this issue involving the cap point and say, you know, this is the clearest demonstration that the UAP had been attempting to convey and then fill in the blank. Everybody's got a theory about what this means. The truth is, really, we will probably never know. Apart from the fact that we might interpret this as being evidence that this thing had an awareness of what the training exercise and some of its parameters and the established cap point had been. And it seemed to be demonstrating this awareness by hovering at that location. Then again, it also could have been a complete coincidence. But that seems like one heck of a coincidence that that thing would go anywhere near the defined cap point and just sit there and hover. But again, we really just don't know. Well, Fravor and Dietrich return to the Nimitz. And as they are coming back in, another section of F A 18s is going out. And in fact, one of those pilots, actually the weapon systems officer going out on that FA18, Chad Underwood, had been operating the ANASQ228 at FLIR targeting pod by Raytheon, and That was the famous imaging system, the infrared targeting pod that captured the footage of this apparent object. Because when this next group of FA18s goes out, Fravor comes back. He tells Underwood, hey, look, be on the lookout. There's something weird out there. And we just saw it. Sure enough, they get out there, they're flying around. The radar operators on board the Princeton find the object again, or what they think is the object, and they vector Underwood and his principal pilot out there in the direction of this thing. And he sure enough gets a lock on it with his camera system, the AT flirt, and films the object, which we now see in the famous footage. Now, a lot of people kind of downplay that footage and say, well, it's too blurry to really be able to make out anything. But right toward the end, there is one moment as Underwood is cycling through the different settings on the app flir, where the Tic Tac appears to come into focus pretty well, and you clearly see a pill shaped object or Tic Tac shaped object. You can clearly see what appears to be light reflecting off of the upper surface of this object while it's hovering out there. Now, the interesting thing about the Bass Report that differs from the modern accounts is they say in modern accounts that this object was moving really quick and that they've been trying to get a lock on this object. Whereas in the original Bass Report from just a few years after this incident occurred, they're actually telling investigators with the DIA at that time, well, the object didn't appear to be moving very fast at all. We just happened to find the thing out there, thanks to the vectoring from the Princeton, went out there, filmed it, and then, of course, when you see the object shoot off to the left, that's just because we stopped trying to lock on the object at all. We were done filming it. So, in short, while all that was happening, the radar intermittently tracked the object the FLIR did obtain imagery. The target initially appeared nearly stationary, according to the Bass report. Then it moved to the left across the display before rapidly accelerating out of the field of view. But then again, some would say that is actually an image artifact. Like we discussed on the recent Pursue releases available@war.gov, a lot of those objects can appear to be doing really weird things, have weird shapes. They can appear to be moving fast, when in fact there are actually things like motion, parallax, or other conditions that give rise to the appearance of their fast movement. And based on the original investigations by the DIA personnel that we find in that Tic Tac Executive summary released by George Knapp, which itself is also portions of it summarized in the Bass report. There are some minor differences in terms of the descriptions of the behavior, the speed and other things that the UAP was observed doing between the account given shortly after the incident way back when and the way some of the pilots talk about it today. But one thing I think we all agree on is that this case seems to have been a very high profile military encounter. Very reputable, highly trained, skilled professionals, including one of the most experienced fighter pilots probably in the military at that time, participated in observations of this object and they captured the dang thing on film. This would by all intents and purposes qualify for being a really good UAP report, wouldn't it? And yet a new theory about what might have actually occurred has come to light. We're going to scrutinize that a bit as we wrap things up here when we come back on the Micah Hanks program. The USS Nimitz incident. We've just gone over the high points of the incident as well as the investigations which were outlined in the original Bass report for many years ago leaked online more recently. But a lot of that also drawing from an executive summary of original investigations conducted by DIA personnel who directly interviewed some of those pilots and others who were involved at the time. Keep in mind also that according to the report, after the incident, the Combat Information center personnel interviewed participants. There were intelligence officers that reportedly collected some accounts, mission tapes were copied for intelligence review. Air crew completed required mission reporting paperwork. But there really wasn't very much else that went on after that. There weren't any official investigations. Witnesses didn't say that they experienced physiological effects or anything weird afterward. There weren't any aircraft malfunctions during the encounter, nothing that seemed to point to anything that was overtly concerning. So very little else was done with this incident. The video, in fact, rather than being kept in a very highly secure location and pondered by top intelligence officials, ended up being leaked online. I think the thing was on YouTube just a few years after the 2004 incident took place. Well, in 2017, when the big story breaks in the New York Times, renewed attention was put on this case, partially because as an addendum to that reporting, an interview with Dave Fraver was also published where he, for the first time, in his own words, spoke publicly about what it was he saw, what he experienced. And the fact that he's still to this day says he can't explain it. Well, fast forward to just earlier this year because the former director of the All Domain anomaly resolution office. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, during a talk that he was giving in Washington to the Capitol area skeptics. And I've mentioned this talk before a few times. I highly recommend that people watch this. You can find it on YouTube. I'll have it linked in the show notes, in fact. But Dr. Kirkpatrick gives a talk and he is giving essentially an overview of everything that he did during his time at Arrow. And you can tell during this talk, I have to say he seems quite irritated in a few instances, both by just some of the general questions people have been asking, but especially in a couple of instances where Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet chimes in from the audience and asks some questions. And specifically one of the questions he has for Sean Kirkpatrick, who is at this point discussing some of the different kinds of balloons and things that can be released. For instance, a radar reflecting kind of balloon that might be released from a submarine operated by China. And it's determined that apparently for decades we've known that these Chinese or Russian operated submarines will sometimes come into an area and they will release these balloons with radar reflectors to try and essentially gauge the extent of our radar capabilities. And if a balloon goes up and suddenly some F A 18s show up, well, then this is a way that a foreign nation can get some information about the extent of our radar capabilities and the range in which these military operations can occur. It's a foreign intelligence gathering operation, in other words, on our military capabilities. So that said, Gallaudet chimes in and asks Sean Kirkpatrick if he thinks essentially this is what was happening with the Nimitz incident, if essentially a submarine below the water had released a balloon and that this in fact is what Fraver and Dietrich had seen and maybe that Chad Underwood had also filmed. I want to feature just a very short audio sound bite now of Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet's question and then also Sean Kirkpatrick's proposed explanation for the incident.
- [50:50]
C
So I, I've met all pilots who had visual observations of the contact. And what. How do you explain that?
- [51:00]
A
I explain it by a couple of different things. One, because I've spoken with them as well, and we've decided we've actually determined that the water underneath the main object that was being observed was welling up, not down, which means the object came out of the water, not into it. And I wasn't pushing down. There was no propulsion associated with it. So there's a couple of things here. One, you've got a really cool optical illusion called parallax that pilots are prone to. I am certain that played into this. Since we're talking about 2004, it's a long time ago for people to remember. We've got actual data that data observations that suggest whatever this thing was came out of the water and not propulsing over it. And then we have the radar. Lots of people like to point to the radar. The radar was actually being tested by DARPA on a new calibration. It was going through its shake and bacon and all those phenomena, those anomalies were from that radar. So can I say that 100%? No, but it sure hell is a lot more convincing and realistic than a bunch of aliens.
- [52:23]
C
I'm not claiming aliens, but it was. It wasn't. It came out of the water and then it also trajected to the cap point. And this is. These are. These are trained aviators.
- [52:36]
A
I understand that they're trained aviators, but they're also trained aviators that are prone to optical illusions like everybody else. And there's no data that suggests that that thing went from point A to point B. It's only a visual report.
- [52:52]
B
Okay. So you can probably tell from that audio soundboard why a lot of people do not like Sean Kirkpatrick. Generally, he appears very dismissive of any ideas that aren't ideas he comes up with. But rather paradoxically, I do want to point out that in Sean Kirkpatrick statements there, while on the one hand he says we don'. Have any kind of data and this is just a visual sighting, and therefore there's no data that can be used to corroborate the claims of the thing going to the cap point or the claims of the object mirroring some of the behaviors of the FA18 as Fravor was flying down close to it. We don't have any data to base any of that on. Paradoxically, he seems very sure that they have determined that the water was coming up and boiling up, not going down. Therefore, whatever the object was, it shot up out of the water. He is convinced that parallax played into the observation of the object and the apparent motion that was perceived by the pilots. There was this DARPA system that was being tested out there. I believe that was called the wasp, by the way. And yes, it has been confirmed that DARPA had been doing some tests out there at the time. But Shankarpetric says that whatever these anomalous tracks that the Princeton had been detecting on radar, that was probably just the stuff DARPA was testing out there. And the Princeton Operators didn't know it. In other words, despite the fact that he concedes we don't have any data to justify the claims made by the pilots who were there and experienced it firsthand, Sean seems very certain of his own conclusions in the absence of any such data. So I do take a bit of an exception to Sean's certainty based on the presumption that, well, this is a better explanation than aliens. Which, of course, to his credit, Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet also says, I'm not making a claim that it's aliens. We just want to know what this actually might have been. But now a final quick follow up with an additional question from Rear Admiral Gallaudet and Sean Kirkpatrick's response to that. And then I want to come back around to an important key detail I pointed out earlier, which I do think raises some intriguing questions about the version of the narrative being presented by Sean Kirkpatrick here. First, that additional follow up question from Tim Gallaudet in the following audio.
- [54:47]
C
So, Sean, respect you immensely. My name Tim Gallaudet, retired rear admiral, former NOAA administrator, having a PhD in oceanography. I don't have any, any other explanation geophysically for what they observed in terms of that. But fine, if that's what I wasn't
- [55:06]
A
suggesting as geophysical, I'm suggesting that there is a probably one of these calibration spheres pops out of the water. And could it have been from somebody else? Absolutely. Because As I said, late 80s, we declassified the CIA program. There's absolutely no reason to believe that somebody else wouldn't do that in our test ranges.
- [55:33]
B
Briefly, just to interject here, the CIA program that Sean Kirkpatrick is referencing, there is the same thing I was describing earlier. The idea that you could take a submarine, release a balloon with a radar reflector and let that fly up into the air and use that to gauge the area in which a radar is operative in an enemy airspace. And he presumes, of course, based on the fact that we know the CIA had been doing that and that information came out in the 1980s, that an enemy nation would probably do the same thing. And he's essentially saying that's a better, more likely explanation for the object observed during the 2004 Nimitz incident. We'll pick up the audio right there.
- [56:07]
A
And we would not know it because our SOSIS network is not all that great.
- [56:13]
C
So, wow, okay, that is a great thing to bring up here in public because if our SOSIS range and our west coast training range in the early 2000s are being infiltrated by adversaries like the Chinese. That is a really important talking point, wouldn't it? Yeah, exactly right, exactly. Why is Congress not investigating that?
- [56:34]
A
Oh, that is a fantastic question. Why don't you ask them that?
- [56:39]
C
I like that. Yes, exactly right.
- [56:40]
A
Why aren't they and doing, you know, I don't know that as opposed to other things.
- [56:46]
B
Oh, that tone just dripping with cynicism. But in any case, it is a fair point. What if China is doing something out there? What if they are releasing balloons out there right off the California coast? Isn't that something we should be concerned about? Tim Gallaudet seems to agree. Yeah, that's something we should really be taking seriously. But my question would be, is that necessarily the best explanation for some of the phenomena that was being observed around that time? Again, without providing any specific details, Sean Kirkpatrick essentially says, well, the anomalous radar tracks that have been detected for days prior to the intercept attempt were just whatever DARPA was testing out there at the time. And the Princeton people didn't know that? Well, I find that to be highly unlikely. And one reason is because as they describe, these objects appear to descend from well above 60,000ft and over the course of several seconds, travel all the way down to about 50ft above sea level, stop, hover, and then take off at very fast speeds, sometimes also ascending. Again, this doesn't sound consistent with any kind of known aircraft, drone or anything known that we have. And in fact, this was so concerning these behaviors exhibited by these objects that the senior chief on board the Princeton at that time, with 17 years of experience tracking ballistic missiles and similar targets, said that these objects, whatever they were, were most consistent with ballistic missiles. Of course, they never found any evidence of those. So whatever was being tested out there, again, being most consistent with the behaviors, the high speed maneuverability of ballistic missiles that seems to have been entirely overlooked in the Arrow investigation, at least under Sean Kirkpatrick. And further, to try and say that the object would have been simply a balloon released from a submarine, when in fact what was actually being observed by Dave Fravor and Alex Dietrich had been moving very erratically when they first observed it, and then it turns toward Fravor, flies in his direction, mirrors some of his motion momentarily before zipping off. Again, Sean Kirkpatrick confidently says this is just motion parallax. Finally, if that were the case, what is the object that was filmed out there by pilot chad Underwood When Dr. Kirkpatrick tells us this was just a visual encounter and that we don't have any data about this. How can we reconcile that with the footage obtained by Chad Underwood? Now, in fairness, I think that obviously the implication here, according to Kirkpatrick, is that we don't know if the object that Chad Underwood filmed later that afternoon is even the same thing that Fravor and Dietrich saw. And in fact, some have gone so far as to try and suggest that they may have misremembered what they saw initially. And having watched the video of whatever Chad Underwood filmed later that day, they misremembered, updated their memory and believed that whatever they experienced earlier that day matched what they see in the footage. I mean, maybe it's possible, but in my humble opinion, when you take into account all of the data, the accounts provided by the operators on board the Princeton, the accounts provided by the pilots of the F A 18s, the footage obtained by Chad Underwood, the investigations by DIA officials, the summary of that that appeared in the Bass report, we look at all that data, and for me at least, it doesn't seem like the explanation offered by Sean Kirkpatrick are quite as cut and dry as he would like us to think they are. But then again, maybe that's just me. Alright, that's all for now, guys. Until next time. As always, stay strange out there. We'll talk again soon. Sam.