"2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen’"

[AniThyng]

NYTimes

The following recounts an incident in 2004 that advocates of research into U.F.O.s have said is the kind of event worthy of more investigation, and that was studied by a Pentagon program that investigated U.F.O.s. Experts caution that earthly explanations often exist for such incidents, and that not knowing the explanation does not mean that the event has interstellar origins.

Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight were on a routine training mission 100 miles out into the Pacific when the radio in each of their F/A-18F Super Hornets crackled: An operations officer aboard the U.S.S. Princeton, a Navy cruiser, wanted to know if they were carrying weapons.

“Two CATM-9s,” Commander Fravor replied, referring to dummy missiles that could not be fired. He had not been expecting any hostile exchanges off the coast of San Diego that November afternoon in 2004.

Commander Fravor, in a recent interview with The New York Times, recalled what happened next. Some of it is captured in a video made public by officials with a Pentagon program that investigated U.F.O.s.

“Well, we’ve got a real-world vector for you,” the radio operator said, according to Commander Fravor. For two weeks, the operator said, the Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up.

Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE


Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program DEC. 16, 2017
ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

The radio operator instructed Commander Fravor and Commander Slaight, who has given a similar account, to investigate.

The two fighter planes headed toward the objects. The Princeton alerted them as they closed in, but when they arrived at “merge plot” with the object — naval aviation parlance for being so close that the Princeton could not tell which were the objects and which were the fighter jets — neither Commander Fravor nor Commander Slaight could see anything at first. There was nothing on their radars, either.

Then, Commander Fravor looked down to the sea. It was calm that day, but the waves were breaking over something that was just below the surface. Whatever it was, it was big enough to cause the sea to churn.

Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of some kind — whitish — that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction, Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling.


By Courtesy of U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE 1:16
Video: U.S. Military Jets Encounter Unknown Object
Video
Video: U.S. Military Jets Encounter Unknown Object
A video shows a 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. By Courtesy of U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE on Publish Date December 16, 2017. Photo by U.S Department of Defense.
ShareTweet
Commander Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him. It was almost as if it were coming to meet him halfway, he said.

Commander Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object.

But then the object peeled away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said in the interview. He was, he said, “pretty weirded out.”

Morning Briefing
Get what you need to know to start your day in the United States, Canada and the Americas, delivered to your inbox.

Sign Up
SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY OPT OUT OR CONTACT US ANYTIME
The two fighter jets then conferred with the operations officer on the Princeton and were told to head to a rendezvous point 60 miles away, called the cap point, in aviation parlance.

They were en route and closing in when the Princeton radioed again. Radar had again picked up the strange aircraft.

“Sir, you won’t believe it,” the radio operator said, “but that thing is at your cap point.”

“We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Commander Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy, said in the interview.

By the time the two fighter jets arrived at the rendezvous point, the object had disappeared.

The fighter jets returned to the Nimitz, where everyone on the ship had learned of Commander Fravor’s encounter and was making fun of him.

Commander Fravor’s superiors did not investigate further and he went on with his career, deploying to the Persian Gulf to provide air support to ground troops during the Iraq war. But he does remember what he said that evening to a fellow pilot who asked him what he thought he had seen.

“I have no idea what I saw,” Commander Fravor replied to the pilot. “It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s.”

But, he added, “I want to fly one.”

Whats the actual story here, rationally? Basically a secret drone?

[Marko Dash]

yeah, a training flight where they'd want everything monitored for the debrief doesn't even get grainy guncam footage.... pull the other one

[AniThyng]

yeah, a training flight where they'd want everything monitored for the debrief doesn't even get grainy guncam footage.... pull the other one

There is grainy FLIR footage, fwiw.

[loomer]

Did you click in, Marko?

[Marko Dash]

i see it now, that window was dead the first time i glanced through.

[AniThyng]

Relevent https://fightersweep.com/1460/x-files-edition/

A more complete article that elaborates on the story as seen in navy circles but of course with much less credibility than the nyt would presumably have.

[AniThyng]

C'mon SDN, i'm counting on you guys to provide a rational explanation (some skeptic sites i've checked out just basically LOL-ed and dismmissed it out of hand).

Some also claim it's just a bug(as in literal insect) on the FLIR.

Though all in all, you'd think they'd have also FOIA'ed the rader logs (if indeed the Princeton was seeing this on radar, as did the E-2, in the fightersweep account) and not just the video...

[Simon_Jester]

I don't see any functional difference between this and dozens of other widely circulating reports of military jets encountering mysterious weird stuff when flying. Either we had ample evidence for aliens in UFOs who inexplicably never bother to really contact us and just dick around in our atmosphere, or this is "People mistake weird ocean/atmospheric effect for an alien spaceship, Incident #872."

[AniThyng]

Ocean atmospheric effects presumably don't also get detected with radar on a cruiser? But I take your point, there's no evidence that part happened as described.

[JI_Joe84]

The video makes it clear this is some thing that was made.
I would bet Russian spy thingy getting caught with its pants down before I would say aliens, hell I would say its American, some black project meant for spying on the Russians, surely we don't need any thing that advanced for North Korea, and some body decided tho see what us fighter pilots would do if they saw it.
Would they be too embarrassed to tell any one? Would they make some thing up? Would they come out and tell every body?
That seems like the Pentagon's thinking, maybe NASA for some future sensitive space projects. And no I don't mean a future alien first contact scenario, I mean some bodies com-sat is getting an unplanned hush hush upgrade.

[Simon_Jester]

Ocean atmospheric effects presumably don't also get detected with radar on a cruiser? But I take your point, there's no evidence that part happened as described.

Basically, people have been reporting UFO sightings for seventy years if not longer depending on how you count. There are certain recurring themes like "supermaneuverable glowy shit in the sky or on the ground." The "military jets went to check out anomalous shit we picked up on radar" is practically its own sub-genre of UFO sighting reports. It seems wow-ing and shocking if you've never read a similar report, but I've seen several incidents like it, going back to P-51 Mustangs chasing funny lights all over the sky back in 1947 or so.

...

At the same time, almost every other detail of the UFO sightings is inconsistent, which is surprising if any significant fraction of the sightings are real authentic sightings of real alien craft. You'd expect a perceptible resemblance among the dozens or hundreds of sighting real crafts, which would all look more or less the same and do more or less the same things. As far as I can tell, no UFO sighting is like any other, not even among the ones that seem in some superficial sense like non-fakes, like this really is a weird unexplained flying craft from another world we're dealing with. So you're left with a couple of possibilities.

One is that no two UFOs are alike. This is highly unlikely if UFOs are made things, artifacts of an intelligent designer that does things for intelligible purposes.

The second is that there are a lot of false UFO sightings and only a handful of true ones whose similarities to each other are lost in the size of the dataset... But that hypothesis breaks Occam's Razor pretty hard, because once you acknowledge that 95% of UFO sightings are weird random weather things or whatever, it's very hard to come up with a justification for why the other 5% aren't also weird random weather things that just happen to be slightly harder to explain.

Another interesting point I think is worth making is that we get a LOT fewer reports of UFOs flying around near ground level, and of alien abductions or aliens landing and getting out of their craft, where they could be easily seen in person, than we used to.

I think this XKCD helps explain it.

[loomer]

Many UFO sightings are like others, actually. While I don't have a comprehensive survey to hand, I've spent many years in the conspiracy world and the vast bulk of sightings I've read about or seen footage of are fairly consistent with one or more others, and seem to evolve over time either due to cultural 'spread' if they aren't real, or alterations to design by whoever made them (us, is my bet). It's not accurate at all to say that no UFO sighting is like any other when there are usually multiple reports of extremely similar designs, like the triangle sighting spate of the 1990s.

[loomer]

Quote is not edit.

[Zixinus]

Yeah, but that's different. That's stories that a certain sub-culture spreads within itself. Simon is talking about military reports of UFOs.

[AniThyng]

I've read on another forum that the object in the video is a JSOW, basically a US glide bomb.

It's also worth noting that the video is actually from a different super hornet than the hornets involved in the incident described in the text.

I'm interested in explanations that explain just what mundane object this is, in case I wasn't clear. What I'm not interested in though is "omg the HUD is fixed forward in real life this is fake" ( unless from I dunno, rogueice or sea skimmer) .

About the HUD thing, this is a FLIR pod with tracking, and not a fixed forward view from the HUD, but again I'm open to correction.

[Simon_Jester]

Many UFO sightings are like others, actually. While I don't have a comprehensive survey to hand, I've spent many years in the conspiracy world and the vast bulk of sightings I've read about or seen footage of are fairly consistent with one or more others, and seem to evolve over time either due to cultural 'spread' if they aren't real, or alterations to design by whoever made them (us, is my bet). It's not accurate at all to say that no UFO sighting is like any other when there are usually multiple reports of extremely similar designs, like the triangle sighting spate of the 1990s.

Okay, let me back up a bit.

Saying "no two UFOs are alike" was my dazed, foggy, coffee-kicking-in self talking.

You're right that there are patterns. At he same time, though, the patterns often look more like subculture patterns spreading, at least to me. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be consistency across both time and space. And there's always the stuff that doesn't match. If UFOs are alien spacecraft, then one would expect all the spacecraft to follow comparable design rules and to share obvious structural similarity, even over long periods. Sort of like how it's been over 100 years since we invented the airplane but nearly all airplanes still have a clearly identifiable nose, tail, and set of wings. One would expect clearly identifiable models with some recognizable evolutionary process (in case alien UFO technology was evolving perceptibly over time)

Instead, we have all sorts of weird one-off wild-cards, patterns that apply to half of UFOs but not the other half, UFOs that everyone saw for three years and then were never seen again, and so on. There is, for lack of a better term, chaos. All sorts of different mission profiles and behaviors.

The lack of consistency, of "rhyme and reason," makes me suspect that a large fraction of the sightings are bunk, and once you accept that thousands of people are mistaking random bunk for UFOs, it's a lot easier to adjust that number upwards. There might be "signal" of a few real alien spacecraft or ultra-advanced Earth-owned prototypes that for some reason no one ever uses for normal purposes, mixed in with all that "noise" of random nonsense. But... meh.

[Sky Captain]

Yeah it is kind of weird. If UFO phenomena are real alien craft then aliens are pranksters, just flash some lights, show some weird stuff, but nothing conclusive and disappear. At least in this case good thing is interstellar or interdimensional travel is easy if it can be used by pranksters like some teenager showing off in a sports car his millionaire dad bought him.

In case of OP whole thing is kind of inconclusive. We have weak radar contact, something seen visually and caught on FLIR, but not enough resolution in those images to make good guess. Multiple sources of detection at least should rule out simple equipment glitch.

If this is some secret Earth built craft then it has propulsion capabilities essentially requiring new physics to explain. It is highly doubtful that some secret organization could have advanced so far ahead everyone else without going public, spied by another nation or just accidentaly leaked some info. Last time when something of comparable magnitude happened was when atomic bomb was invented and that quickly went public. We don't live in a Stargate universe where crazy stuff can be kept secret forever.

[Sea Skimmer]

I've read on another forum that the object in the video is a JSOW, basically a US glide bomb.

Whomever said that doesn't know what a JSOW looks like then, this has no wings and the wrong shape entirely, and is maintaining a stable airspeed against the wind. It's not a glide bomb for certain. A UAV, maybe, some weird configurations of aircraft are possible if you only need to fly at .58 mach factor. It's pretty clear more then one UFO crash report in CONUS over the past 30 years (as in one's we've got documented Police/Fire responses on) involved classified aircraft. Probably part of how the RQ-170 came out Darkstar ect...

I dunno what's in that video, but now that ball lighting has been captured in multi spectral photography (the results suggest its a cloud of dirt being vaporized by electrical activity in the atmosphere FYI) I suspect we will find that most of the unexplainable UFO sightings are linked to that kind of thing. It just may take several more decades before the proliferation of affordable multi spectral optics lets us capture a lot of information about them. Just look how badly documented Blue jets are, and we've known about them for over 20 years now.

The Princeton-F/A-18 contact is more interesting because the pilot claims to have seen the object in the water and not just in the air. That makes it more difficult to explain in any manner, even if it was an Alien spacecraft why on earth would they crash into the ocean just to zoom away again?

An awful lot of airborne UFO contacts though seem like chasing your own shadow situations though, possible ball lighting like events being generated by the aircraft's own electrical distortion (aircraft generate huge static charges while flying, enough to ignite material and kill people) or similar high power radar induced effects. We do not really understand the atmopshere at all in detailed electrical terms, and the way radars work (with its own high power levels) remains a bit magical in its own right and subject to very complex variables.

Anyway, both sides of the iron curtain experienced events like this, studied them to death and always found that a minority, but non trivial number could not be explained by any known mechanic. But at the same time both sides also found that you could never get close. That doesn't sound like aliens to me.

[Sea Skimmer]

Though all in all, you'd think they'd have also FOIA'ed the rader logs (if indeed the Princeton was seeing this on radar, as did the E-2, in the fightersweep account) and not just the video...

I think your odds of getting a successful FOIA request for SPY-1 radar logs that might not even exist anymore, are about zero. Additional thing to this is if this was a real 40ft diameter contact at 80,000ft 100nm off the US coast two or three land based radar sites should have picked it up at least intermittently. Nobody is claiming that, but it is the sort of thing a formal investigation would have checked out. I'm skeptical on the E-2 claim BTW, it seems like it was added into certain versions of the story, and that is exactly how UFO conspiracy shit keeps itself rolling.

[The Romulan Republic]

Yeah it is kind of weird. If UFO phenomena are real alien craft then aliens are pranksters, just flash some lights, show some weird stuff, but nothing conclusive and disappear. At least in this case good thing is interstellar or interdimensional travel is easy if it can be used by pranksters like some teenager showing off in a sports car his millionaire dad bought him.

You don't know how much I'd love for that to be true.

I don't want first contact or discovery of aliens of any kind to happen right now though- because the current POTUS is utterly unfit to handle it, and if he didn't screw it up, then he would undeservedly go down as one of the most important Presidents in history, just because one of the biggest discoveries in human history happened to occur under his... whatever you call what Trump has substituted for actual leadership.

Well... unless first contact is the Galactic Senate declaring an intervention on Earth to deal with Trump or something like that. Then I'd be cool with it.

[AniThyng]

Yeah it is kind of weird. If UFO phenomena are real alien craft then aliens are pranksters, just flash some lights, show some weird stuff, but nothing conclusive and disappear. At least in this case good thing is interstellar or interdimensional travel is easy if it can be used by pranksters like some teenager showing off in a sports car his millionaire dad bought him.

You don't know how much I'd love for that to be true.

I don't want first contact or discovery of aliens of any kind to happen right now though- because the current POTUS is utterly unfit to handle it, and if he didn't screw it up, then he would undeservedly go down as one of the most important Presidents in history, just because one of the biggest discoveries in human history happened to occur under his... whatever you call what Trump has substituted for actual leadership.

Well... unless first contact is the Galactic Senate declaring an intervention on Earth to deal with Trump or something like that. Then I'd be cool with it.

Lol I know you say it in jest but honestly, outside superpowers declaring interventions to deal with the local petty dictator never end well on Earth and I doubt it will be any different on a Galactic scale

[The Romulan Republic]

Hopefully their knowledge of how to occupy has advanced as swiftly as their knowledge of space flight.

Edit: Although, really, if a civilization is casually capable of interstellar travel, they might view us as more akin to how we view chimps, than a country to be engaged with politically/militarily. In other words, we might simply not rate an "intervention".

[AniThyng]

A theme in the image comic "port of earth". Aliens come and strike a deal. Only they are basically space Enron and treat us like primitive hicks and turn earth into a truck stop.

[AniThyng]

Though all in all, you'd think they'd have also FOIA'ed the rader logs (if indeed the Princeton was seeing this on radar, as did the E-2, in the fightersweep account) and not just the video...

I think your odds of getting a successful FOIA request for SPY-1 radar logs that might not even exist anymore, are about zero. Additional thing to this is if this was a real 40ft diameter contact at 80,000ft 100nm off the US coast two or three land based radar sites should have picked it up at least intermittently. Nobody is claiming that, but it is the sort of thing a formal investigation would have checked out. I'm skeptical on the E-2 claim BTW, it seems like it was added into certain versions of the story, and that is exactly how UFO conspiracy shit keeps itself rolling.

Ultimately it seems, even by the pilots account the rest of the crew knew about it and took the opportunity to make X files jokes out of the whole thing so it's really something of a just a regular thing that happens that's now being spun with a out of context unrelated video huh.

Still, as with most things if this type I think the fun is not in the debunking that it's not paranormal, but in the proving what mundane phenomenon it really was.

[Zixinus]

The thing is that not all strange phenomenon has to be proven to be mundane. Non-mundane stuff could potentially happen or can be a matter of perspective. Ball lightning was one, as Skimmer mentions. Even more exotic stuff like the introduction of foreign or irregular vehicles either from a different factions of the same country's military or from an-other's. Also, rocks do fall from space sometimes and do strange things.

Every pilot with four-digit plus hours up in the sky probably saw stuff they couldn't explain. It's part of the job, heck, almost most jobs that include lots of traveling. Strange, inexplicable stuff happening.

The fallacy is the idea that "we can't readily explain it, it must be aliens!". That's where the crazy begins and where you need a mounting number of increasingly absurd assumptions for it to work. Where you stop trying to analyze the event and instead start creating an elaborate system of justification for a preconceived notion.