You might not believe in UFOs or anything like that. But for US Navy pilots aboard the aircraft carrier “USS Theodore Roosevelt”, these “things” were over the sea every time they flew their “F/A-18 Super Hornet Fighters”. These “things” reached speeds of 3,000+ MPH with no engine, and were able to fly at 30,000 feet.
From the summer of 2014 to March 2015, during training practice, US Navy pilots reported these objects while they flew in the East Coast. One Navy pilot who reported a similar incident to The Congress and The Pentagon (the commander of the US military air force) was Lieutenant Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 pilot aboard the aircraft “USS Theodore Roosevelt”. “Keeping aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours is 11 hours longer than we’d expect,” Ryan Graves stated.
Over the years, there have been many UFO related incidents. For example, in 2014, a F/A-18 almost crashed with a UFO while in the air. Other incidents were documented. In one of those recordings, pilots questioned themselves about the object they saw through the camera, that was flying over the sea. While the Defense Department stayed silent and others came up with possible theories to answer these questions, Navy pilots, interviewed by The New York Times, did not know where they came from.
As the US Navy started to drive its attention toward these incidents. In early 2019, the Navy started to send ways on how to announce these events that officials called “unexplained aerial phenomena” or “unidentified flying objects” (UFO).
The Pentagon investigated the events with its secret “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” using evidence from both video and radar data from the Navy pilots. Although the program ended in 2012 due to low funding, the Navy and others in the table such as Luis Elizondo, a US Intelligence Officer, said that the program secretly continues. Plus it analyzed video evidence of 2004 in San Diego of 2 Navy fighters that saw a giant oval tic tac object the size of a commercial plane. For Senior Astrophysicist Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, these “objects”might be seen because of failures in the camera system, such as bugs.
Adam Ferguson, New York Times
In an incident in 2014, when pilots were going to the Persian Gulf from the Naval Air Station in Oceana in Virginia, Lieutenant Ryan Graves and Lieutenant Danny Accoin were part of the Navy “VFA-11 Red Rippers Squadron” and tracked with their new radars these “objects”. According to Ryan Graves, they detected them at altitudes of 30,000 ft and almost in the sea, plus these “things” would advance, stop, and zoom at hypersonic (3,000+ MPH) speed. Danny Accoin also encountered these “objects”’ and on one occasion, he detected the object and flew 1,000 ft under it to see it himself, but couldn’t even though the radar told him it was there. A few days later, he acquired one of these “things” with his missile, but still couldn’t see it. At that time, these Navy pilots thought these “things” were part of a top secret drone program, but it became another speculation after one of Ryan Grave’s squadron companions told him that he had almost hit one of those “objects” after it had passed between two F/A-18s while flying. According to that pilot, the “object” appeared to be a sphere encasing a cubelike object. This enraged his squadron and realized this wasn’t anything related to secret drones since the government wouldn’t send drones to interfere with training. According to Lieutenant Graves, this was a security concern.
What pilots saw through the aircraft video was that these “objects” were doing things that passed the limits that any human could survive in a vehicle. Such as:
zoom at hypersonic (Match 5+ speeds), stop completely, and perform rapid rotations. Still when the pilots were asked by The New York Times what they could be, they couldn’t answer.
Video evidence of pilots seeing these “things”:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/players/offsite/index.html?videoId=100000006525294
‘Look at that thing’: Footage Shows Pilots Spotting Unknown Object , NY Times. Video by U.S Department of Defense.
“Speed doesn’t kill you, stopping does. Or acceleration”, stated Ryan Graves.
“We have helicopters that can hover, we have aircraft that can fly at 30,000 feet and right at the surface”. But, “combine all that in one vehicle of some type with no jet engine, no exhaust plume”, said Lieutenant Graves.
Also in 2015, when they flew over Iraq and Syria, that was part of a militry operation to bomb the Islamic State, Graves and Accoin also flew with these “things”. According to pilots, those “object” sightings decreased when they were out of US airspace.
So for the next time you buy a tic tac box, imagine that there are objects with that shape but bigger, faster, invisible and flying at high altitudes, all over the sky.
——————————————————————————————————————-
Sources:
Cooper, H. & Blumenthal, R. & Kean, L. (2019, May 26). ‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html
Glenn Research Center. (n.d.). Hypersonic Aircraft. NASA. Retrieved March 29, 2022, from https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/BGP/lowhyper.html