The UFO Sightings that Pushed the UK to Take 'Flying Saucers' More Seriously

The incidents interrupted Exercise Mainbrace, a massive set of NATO war-game maneuvers.

In late September 1952, only months after a rash of “flying saucer” sightings over Washington, D.C. made headlines around the world, dozens of military officers participating in NATO exercises in the North Atlantic were struck by their own UFO fever.

Exercise Mainbrace was the largest peacetime military exercise since World War II. The war-game-style maneuvers simulated NATO’s response to a mock attack on Europe, presumably by the Soviet Union. The Mainbrace operation involved 200 ships, 1,000 planes and 80,000 soldiers from multiple NATO countries—including large deployments from the United States and the United Kingdom.

In a year dominated by news reports of UFO sightings, Pentagon officials half-joked with Naval Intelligence that they should keep an eye out for aliens during the NATO exercises, said Edward Ruppelt, the U.S. Air Force captain in charge of the top-secret Project Blue Book UFO investigations.

As it turns out, they weren’t off base. “[N]o one really expected the UFOs to show up,” Ruppelt wrote in his 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. “Nevertheless, once again the UFOs were their old unpredictable selves—they were there.”

Not a weather balloon

The first Mainbrace encounter came on September 13 when the captain and crew of a Danish destroyer spotted a triangular-shaped object moving through the night sky at alarming speeds. The unidentified craft emitted a blue glow and was estimated by Lieutenant Commander Schmidt Jensen to be traveling upward of 900 miles per hour.

On September 20, an American newspaper reporter named Wallace Litwin was aboard the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier participating in the Mainbrace exercises, when he saw a commotion on deck: several pilots and flight-crew members pointing at a silver sphere in the sky that appeared to be following the fleet. Litwin quickly shot four color photos of the round object, which he assumed was a weather balloon.

In a letter to a UFO investigator years later, Litwin recounts that he went below deck and joked with fellow newspaper correspondents that he had just “shot a flying saucer.” This caught the attention of the ship’s executive officer, who informed Litwin that no weather balloons had been released that day. The officer then radioed the Midway, the only other ship in the vicinity, which also confirmed that no weather balloons were in the air or unaccounted for.

“In other words, the skies above this NATO fleet were very carefully observed and nothing flew around overhead unobserved,” wrote Litwin, “But I knew that I had taken a picture (4) of what looked like a ping-pong ball 10 feet over my head.”

Ruppelt and the Project Blue Book team followed up with the Navy and interviewed members of the flight-deck crew. Some dismissed it as a weather balloon, while others had their doubts.

“It was traveling too fast, and although it resembled a balloon in some ways,” wrote Ruppelt. And “it was far from being identical to the hundreds of balloons that the crew had seen the aerologists launch.”

The Topcliffe sighting: ‘faster than a shooting star’

The most perplexing sighting—the one that may have single-handedly relaunched the British military’s interest in UFOs—was reported by a half-dozen Royal Air Force (RAF) officers and air crew based in Topcliffe, Yorkshire, England.

It took place on September 19, as a British Meteor fighter jet was returning to the Topcliffe airfield from exercises over the North Sea. When the plane had descended to 5,000 feet, crew on the ground spotted a silvery, circular object traveling several thousand feet above the Meteor, but on its same trajectory.

In a report preserved in the National Archives, RAF Flight Lieutenant John Kilburn of 269 Squadron said the object then began to descend toward the Meteor, “swinging in a pendular motion…similar to a falling sycamore leaf.” At first, Kilburn thought it was a parachute or engine cowling that had broken loose from the jet.

Then the object stopped suddenly in mid-air, rotated on its own axis and zipped off at incredible speeds over the horizon.

“The acceleration was in excess of that of a shooting star,” reported Kilburn. “I have never seen such a phenomenon before. The movements of the object were not identifiable with anything I have seen in the air.”

Unlike previous UFO sightings kept hush-hush by the RAF and Royal Navy, the Topcliffe sighting was leaked to the press—and splashed across the front page of Sunday newspapers. “‘Saucer’ Chased RAF Jet Plane,” reported the Sunday Dispatch with a photo of five of the airmen, including Kilburn.

The circus-like publicity surrounding the Topcliffe incident put the British military intelligence in a difficult spot. They couldn’t ignore questions from the press, but they also weren’t interested in a serious investigation into UFOs. They’d already been down that road.

The secret UFO report shared with Churchill

While conducting research in the UK National Archives in 2001 for a book called Out of the Shadows: UFOs, the Establishment & the Official Cover-Up, British journalist and UFO investigator David Clarke made an incredible discovery. Despite officials’ repeated denials that they existed, he uncovered documents that referenced top-secret UK government UFO investigations.

The six-page report from the Ministry of Defence’s Directorate of Scientific Intelligence (the equivalent of the CIA in America), dated June 1951, was produced by a top-secret panel of military-intelligence experts known as the “Flying Saucer Working Party.”

According to the report, the five-member team had been meeting since 1950 to analyze reports of unexplained sightings from RAF and Royal Navy pilots. The Flying Saucer Working Party, much like the Air Force higher-ups overseeing the Project Blue Book investigations in America, dismissed all sightings by experienced military personnel as either “mistaken identification of conventional aircraft,” “optical illusions and psychological delusions,” known “astronomical or meteorological phenomena” or “deliberate hoaxes.”

The clandestine team concluded that the only way to get substantiated data on UFOs would be to establish a global network of radar stations and photographers continuously monitoring the sky for aberrations.

“We should regard this, on the evidence so far available, as a singularly profitless enterprise,” they wrote. “We accordingly recommend very strongly that no further investigation of reported mysterious aerial phenomena be undertaken, unless and until some material evidence becomes available.”

This was the conclusion shared with Winston Churchill when he fired off a memo in the summer of 1952 reading, “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience.” Churchill was shown the top-secret report and the topic of UFO investigations was briefly laid to rest. That is, until Exercise Mainbrace.

Perhaps one of the most important events in UFO history are those that are said to have occurred during Operation Mainbrace, a NATO training exercise involving multiple countries in September 1952. The operation featured eight NATO countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark, Norway, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium), as well as the New Zealand military. In all 80,000 soldiers were involved, utilizing over 200 planes and around 1,000 ships, and took place somewhere off the coast of Denmark and Norway.

As well the general training for their own respective militaries, the operation was a discreet but purposeful demonstration of the powers of NATO amid the nuclear fears of the Cold War should such nations as the Soviet Union contemplate such an attack. The operation also saw several UFO sightings – one of which produced an intriguing picture – that were witnessed by multiple people. In fact, the sightings were so persistent during the operation that their presence can only be seen as purposeful in overlooking the activity in the North Atlantic. However, as we will see when we examine one of the ships involved in the operation, and more specifically, what might have been on board, the reasons for such a UFO presence might be even more alarming.

UFO Activity Starts Almost Straight Away!

Most records state that Operation Mainbrace began on the 14th of September 1952 and ran until the 25th. However, according to Richard Hall, operations began on 13th September, and Hall himself writes that “sources differ on the exact dates but agree on details”. And he tells of an intriguing encounter that was witnessed by several crew on board the Danish destroyer, Willemoes on that evening.

According to Hall on the evening in question, the Danish vessel was “participating in the maneuvers” in the water near Bornholm Island. However, during these, along with several other members of the crew, Lieutenant Commander Schmidt Jensen noticed a triangular-shaped object that appeared to glow a bluish color and “moved at high speed”. Jenson would later estimate that the object was traveling around 900 miles per hour (once again, some sources differ, stating the speed was as fast as 1,500 miles per hour).

On the same day, another sighting of fast-moving objects was reported. This time, three objects were witnessed traveling in a triangular formation. According to the details of the report, the craft each gave a “white light exhaust”.

Rather than being a one-off incident, these would prove to be just the first of several sightings of strange objects during the military maneuvers. That these craft – whatever they might have been – should show up during such an operation should perhaps alert us to the fact that the intelligence behind them seemingly has a definite interest in the goings-on of the world’s militaries.

The USS Franklin D. Roosevelt Sighting

Without a doubt, one of the most intriguing sightings occurred on the afternoon of 20th September when multiple crew onboard the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt witnessed a silvery, sphere-shaped object in the skies overhead. What’s more, it would remain visible for a considerable amount of time. At first, those who witnessed the object thought it was a weather balloon. However, when it became clear that there had been no balloon launches that day, the crew realized they were watching something out of the ordinary.

A photographer on board the ship, Wallace Litwin, managed to take several shots of the strange objects. You can see one of those pictures below which, incidentally, would only be made public decades later. The project chief, Captain Ed Ruppelt would state in his report that the object was “plenty large enough to show up on a photo”, which he would later describe as “excellent”, elaborating how the photographer had managed to capture the “superstructure of the carrier in each one and, judging from the size of the object” it was clear that “it was moving rapidly”.

Ruppelt would continue that “although it resembled a balloon in some ways it was far from being identical” to the many balloons he and the crew had witnessed during their careers. It is perhaps worth examining a letter Litwin would write to researcher Ole Henningsen. In it, he would state that he, along with several other journalists, had managed to find out the USS Roosevelt was “carrying an atom bomb, in a small room far below the decks”. He would further state that this was denied by the Navy themselves, but after plying “some of the navy people with charm, money, and booze”, they had their suspicions confirmed and wondered whether it “might relate to the white sphere”.

This is certainly an interesting question. After all, we know that UFOs – or their occupants – appear to have an interest in such powerful weaponry and what humans might do with it. Might this atom bomb – if the report is accurate – have been what attracted apparent extraterrestrial interest.

Captain Ruppelt would also state that it was only because of the many other incidents that would occur during the operation that they pushed so hard for answers. One of those incidents occurred around 24 hours earlier, this time over the North Sea.

Operation Charlie

Six months before Kenneth Arnold’s seminal sighting of a formation of nine strange objects above the Cascade Mountains, unidentified flying objects were tracked by Britain’s Air Defence radars.

“Flying Saucers” and UFOs were concepts that had not been invented when a RAF station placed an urgent call to HQ Fighter Command reporting an unusual blip moving towards the English coast. It was January 1947, and the war-weary country was bracing itself for the arrival of some of the most severe winter weather ever experienced in Britain. As temperatures fell below freezing, gale force winds were followed by six weeks of heavy snow. Public transport ground to a halt and the Government were forced to set up a ‘crisis Cabinet’ as power cuts plunged the country into chaos. In the midst of this ferocious winter eastern England began to receive visits from what the RAF described in official records as ‘an unidentified high-flying aircraft’. This ‘ghost aircraft’ was by definition an ‘unidentified flying object.’

This paper summarises all the available information relating to these important, pre-Kenneth Arnold incidents from the UK. It is based upon evidence collected from official files held by the Public Record Office (PRO) in London, newspaper archives and interviews with former Royal Air Force personnel who played a part in Operation Charlie.

X-raids, 1945-46

During the course of the research into these incidents we appealed for information from RAF aircrew and fighter control personnel who served during the post-war period. We received two replies from senior RAF officers who had been present when unusual echoes were detected by Britain’s air defence radar system. The initial incidents occurred during the period 1945-47, immediately before and after the ‘ghost rocket’ wave in Scandinavia. At this time Flight Lieutenant Geoffrey Easterling was posted to the Filter Room at RAF No 12 Group, Watnall, Nottinghamshire, where information from coastal radar stations was collated and plotted. 12 Group was responsible for the air defence of a large swathe of the English east coast and North Sea approaches. Easterling recalled:

“During this time incidents of very high-flying aircraft were not too uncommon. There were lots of what we called X-raids picked up on the long-range Chain Home radars – unidentified, high-altitude and spasmodic. They did not register with any of the civilian airlines and they were too high for that. Whilst I remember the events of January 1947 I can also remember one or two similar approaches whilst at Watnall from late September 1945 into January 1946. These were very high. They came over the top of the lobes at 35,000 feet estimated and very fast. This caused a bit of panic and doubt as that sort of height was much beyond any of our aircraft (which we knew about). There was of course talk of Russian spy planes monitoring our radio frequencies and our R/T communications. It was suggested they had devices which could ascertain the limits of our radar (by an internal device which they had), but all of this was a bit ‘pie in the sky’ and of course Top Secret in those days – it was all treated with a great deal of doubt and suspicion, no doubt because such heights and speeds had never been seen by the old hands with wartime raid reporting experience.” [1]

Flt Lt Easterling remains convinced these high-flying tracks were Soviet aircraft flying to and from bases in occupied Germany. “It was a fairly common thing during the Cold War,” he said. “We put these X-raids down to Russian bears. Sometimes aircraft were scrambled but nothing was seen.”

Suspicion of Soviet intentions in Western Europe was endemic and in 1947 the former Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, made his famous speech describing how an “Iron Curtain” had descended across the European continent. It was logical, in this climate of mutual hostility, that Britain’s defence chiefs would consider the possibility that the ‘ghost planes’ tracked over the North Sea were a form of advanced Russian intruder aircraft, developed using cutting-edge German technology captured at the end of the war.

The Ghost Plane

The mysterious radar echoes first came to attention of the public when the London Daily Mail splashed a story across the front page of its 29 April 1947 edition. The headline was: ‘Ghost plane over coast, RAF spot it – can’t catch it’:

‘A “ghost” plane which flies in over the East Anglia coast near Norwich at midnight at a great height and disappears inland is puzzling the Royal Air Force. All attempts at interception have so far failed. Crack night-fighter pilots have been sent up in Fighter Command’s latest Mosquitoes, but the mystery aircraft has got away every time. It always crosses the coast at roughly the same spot, and it has used such effective evasive tactics that it is thought to be equipped with radar to give warning of the approach of intercepting aircraft. Time and again Fighter Command radar operators, plotting the ghost plane’s course over East Anglia, have watched the “blip” go right across their screen and disappear as the plane penetrated deep inland. They have watched vainly for the “trace” to reappear, moving in the opposite direction, as the plane flew back out to sea. Some experts suspect that the plane is engaged in a highly organised and lavishly financed smuggling operation, using one or more secret landing places. According to authoritative information the plane – of unidentified type – has a speed of nearly 400 mph and a fast rate of climb.’

When questioned the Air Ministry refused to speculate upon the identity of the ‘ghost plane’ but they did admit that Fighter Command had twice received what it described as ‘some extraordinary plots’ from its coastal radar stations. The ‘ghost plane’, according to the Daily Mail, had displayed ‘enormous height range and remarkable speed variations’ of between 400 and 425 mph, in excess of the top speed achieved by Britain’s night-fighters, the Mosquitoes, that were slowly being replaced by the new Meteor jet for QRA duties. [2]

This ghost plane or ‘UFO’ was listed in RAF records as ‘X-362’. The designation ‘X’ for X-raid was allocated to numbered radar tracks that could not be identified, and were assumed to be hostile. Early in 1947 one ‘X’ had become so familiar to officers in Fighter Command’s operations room that they invented a nickname – ‘Charlie.’ The scheme to trap and intercept target X became known by the code-words: ‘Operation Charlie’. »

Chain Home

In the post-war era, Britain’s air defences continued to rely upon the Chain Home (CH) radar system for air defence. CH was a network of coastal stations characterised by aerials mounted on tall wooden towers. CH appears crude by today’s standards but the stations were at that time the most advanced Early Warning system in the world. Radar was developed in great secrecy before the outbreak of war and by 1939 its coverage stretched from the Isle of Wight to the Scottish border. CH gave Fighter Command advanced warning of enemy aircraft approaching the English coast and the development of Ground Controlled Interception (GCI) made it possible for fighters to be guided towards them. Chain Home allowed the RAF to win the Battle of Britain and ensured that radar would play a major role in future air defence systems.

On occasions in 1939 and again in 1941 before the Battle of Britain, stations on the CH chain had detected unusual echoes approaching the English Coast that were reported to wartime Filter Rooms and RAF Fighter Command. On several occasions fighters equipped with early versions of airborne radar were scrambled to investigate but nothing was found and the phenomena were attributed to anomalous propagation (AP) or “unusual atmospheric conditions.”[3] As Britain was fighting a war no in-depth investigation of the reports was made by the scientific staff, but the Air Ministry were becoming aware that the radars which helped to defend the British coast were prone to AP and other spurious returns nick-named ‘angels’ which could on occasion be interpreted as intruder aircraft.

At the end of the war the CH chain was largely mothballed and with power shortages only the GCI stations remained active, mainly in daylight hours. Once or twice per month the system was switched on for a time during the evening for ‘Bullseye’ training exercises organised by Bomber Command. These involved convoys of lumbering wartime bombers flying south from their bases in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. On reaching the coast they would cross the North Sea towards the Low Countries as the GCI’s guided fighters onto their tails to simulate ‘live’ interceptions.

16 January 1947 – The North Sea incident

On the evening of 16 January 1947 Flight Lieutenant David Richards was a senior controller and 2nd in Command of the filter room of RAF No. 11 Group, Bentley Priory. This was situated in the grounds of Hill House, a large Victorian mansion at Stanmore, northwest of London. A Bullseye exercise was in progress, involving mosquitoes of 25 and 29 Squadrons, from RAF West Malling in Kent. Two aircraft from 29 Squadron were operating off the East Coast under the control of the GCI at Trimley Heath, near Felixstowe, Suffolk. GCIs reported to 11 Group Operations Room at Uxbridge, who ‘told’ their plots to the Filter Room at Stanmore. The first clue that something unusual had happened came when Richards received a call on a landline. He recalled:

‘Trimley came up on my direct phone to report a strange plot which was either stationary at a great height or moving erratically at a great speed and then stopping again. If this was a conventional aircraft it would have travelled in a straight line, but it did not do that. This was not an aircraft, it was something very odd. 400 mph [quoted in the Daily Mail] is a pretty disappointing figure, as it is within the range of some 1947 aircraft types. Somebody – either at one of the [radar] stations or at Uxbridge [11 Group Operations Room] – had computed speed between the rather intermittent plots and had come up with a startling figure of 1,000 mph.’ [4]

A speed of 1,000 mph was truly startling, for it was not until October 1947 that US test pilot Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier (760 mph/1,220 kph at sea level) in a Bell X-1 rocket plane. Richards continues:

‘This [estimated speed] emphasises that the thing did not appear to move in a straight course, but faded and reappeared and sometimes stood still, before fading again. Without visual identification – there was none – it would be impossible for the [crew] to be certain it was investigating the same object. Note that it [the Mosquito] carried out an interception on a Lancaster during the 40 minutes between. In this time, at even 400 mph a straight course would take the aircraft from the East Coast to Scotland! I can recall this question of plot identification arising in conversations between us, our stations and Uxbridge at the time. They [Trimley Heath GCI] were looking at the tube and could judge if the echoes were the same object or a new one. This probably gave rise to the estimated speed, based on reappearances in a different place and a different height. Trimley were interrogated on this both by ourselves and Uxbridge, but stuck to their guns. After some talk between Uxbridge and the scientific officers at the stations making the observation on the validity of their plots, not a meteorological balloon etc (which I had already done), it was decided to [divert] a Mossie to investigate.’ [5]

If the target was a plane, it was displaying unheard of flight characteristics. Yet if it wasn’t a plane, what could it be?

Flight Lieutenant Easterling was also present at HQ No 11 Group when the incident began. He recalls the initial radar track occurred somewhere above the Dutch islands before it was acquired by the GCI. “It came across towards us during the course of an hour or so, stopping and starting, towards Norfolk where it crossed the coastline towards Lincolnshire. Mossies were the only aircraft we had that could reach that height with oxygen.” David Richards corroborates this impression. He said that since initial contact was made near the Dutch coast “the object was almost certainly detected by our Chain Home stations. These did not normally operate overland and only looked seaward.”

Details of the incident which followed have been preserved in the RAF operations record books (ORBs). ORBs were the logbooks compiled by RAF stations and squadrons to record daily and monthly activities, including everything from sporting events to exercises and operations. During the Cold War, security restrictions meant that few, if any, entries were made in ORBs that refer specifically to investigations of ‘unidentified’ radar tracks. For this reason, the records for 1947 are unique as they allow us to reconstruct how the RAF reacted when confronted by the unknown.

The ORB of Eastern Fighter Sector HQ, RAF Horsham St. Faith (Norfolk), dated 16 January 1947, reveals:

‘An unidentified aircraft had been plotted in WC 9585 at 38,000 ft., and Eastern Sector Ops were requested by Group to scramble a Mosquito of 23 Sqdn. to intercept. However, as there was no aircraft available with oxygen this was impossible, and Sector Ops were informed by 12 Group that an aircraft of 11 Group which was already airborne on a Bullseye exercise would try to intercept under Trimley Heath Control.’ [6] »

The original tracking placed the target at 38,000 feet moving on a westerly course across the North Sea. According to an Air Ministry memorandum to the US Army Air Force, the incident began 50 miles from the Dutch coast at 52’ 52’’ N 02’ 37’’E. Later contacts involving Trimley Heath GCI, occurred at lower altitude, placing the ‘blip’ level with the bombers participating in the Bullseye exercise. At Trimley Heath the station’s operations log recorded how Mosquito call-sign HAIROIL 27 made an initial contact with an “unidentified” target at 2014 hours when at 17,000 feet but soon lost it. Whilst searching for the target the navigator then picked up a Lancaster or a Lincoln on his airborne radar before GCI guided him towards the ‘unidentified’ target, whereupon:

‘…five other contacts [were] obtained in quick succession on X. 362 (OPERATION CHARLIE) which was chased from 2120 hours until 2202 hours when interception was abandoned due to A.I. [airborne radar] trouble. This target was completely unidentified. Height at the commencement of the interception was 17,000 feet and target descended to 6,000 feet by 2202 hours.’ [7]

A brief summary of the incident appears in HQ No 11 Group Fighter Command Operations book, which reads:

“...two aircraft operating off the East Coast under Trimley Heath G.C.I. obtained 5 contacts and 5 kills on Lancasters between 15,000 and 18,000 feet...One of these aircraft chased an unidentified aircraft between 2130 and 2200 hours from 22,000 to 5,000 feet. No visual was obtained.” [8]

The report to the US Army Air Force, attributed to ‘Air Ministry, Great Britain’ summarises the incident as follows:

“During normal night-flying practice at 2230 hours…one of British Mosquitos was vectored on to an unidentified A/C at 22,000 ft. A long chase ensued commencing over the North Sea about 50 miles from the Dutch Coast and ending at 2300 hours over Norfolk. Two brief AI contacts were made but faded quickly. The unidentified aircraft appeared to take efficient controlled evasive action.” [9]

‘Evasive action’ implies intelligent control and this incident raised fears that an enemy aircraft had intruded upon the exercise. However, it quickly became apparent that no Soviet aircraft could match the performance displayed by this ‘flying object’.

The incident was also linked to another ‘X raid’ tracked by earlier that same day. Shortly after 12 noon, Meteors of 74 and 245 Squadrons from RAF Horsham St. Faith were involved in interception practice under the control of the GCI at RAF Neatishead when an unidentified target was tracked at 30,000 feet over Norfolk. The Commanding Officer of 74 Squadron, Squadron Leader Cooksey was asked to divert and intercept but was unable to follow the target due to lack of fuel. Meteor call-sign Kremlin 34 was scrambled but ‘the aircraft disappeared out of range to the North of [Neatishead].” [10]

Flt Lt Richards recalled the concern which followed at the Air Ministry and he was ordered to write ‘a confidential report’ on the incident copied to HQ Fighter Command. “I would assume that the account of the Filter Room picture would have been included in a fuller report from 11 Group which would include similar reports – probably confidential and not included in the ORBs from the GCIs.” In summary, Richards said:

‘The event has always stuck in my memory as my only “encounter of the third kind” and although the term “UFO” was not in use then, we wondered if the wily Russians had produced some secret aircraft from a rapid development of German technology which we in the RAF were beginning to realise was so far ahead of our own.’ [11]

Six months later, in July 1947 the FBI agreed to help the USAAF’s embryonic study of ‘flying disks’ that would became Project Sign. One of a number of unexplained incidents forwarded to the bureau was a copy of the brief Air Ministry memo concerning the North Sea incident. [12] The Air Ministry case summary stated that: ‘…no explanation has been forthcoming, nor has it been repeated.’

This information was not entirely accurate, because a very similar incident had occurred just 24 hours after the North Sea incident. As a direct result, Fighter Command immediately extended its night radar watch. All stations were on alert to watch for the reappearance of ‘Charlie’. »

17 January 1947: Operation Charlie phase 2

On the afternoon of 17 January two Chain Home Low stations in Lincolnshire (Skendleby and Humberstone) tracked what they described as “an exceptionally good track” (U294) at 10,000 feet above the North Sea. With Eastern Sector on alert, Meteor jets from 245 Squadron were placed on standby to scramble if Charlie came within range, but the plot faded from their screens. At 1945 hours the radar station at Humberstone, near Grimsby again tracked an unidentified target over the sea for a period of 30 minutes at a speed of more than 200 mph. The station log records:

‘U. 306 [unidentified plot] was followed continuously for 90 miles at 10,000 feet, moving east to west over the North Sea before changing direction towards the south, moving once again across the Wash towards the Norfolk coast.’ [13]

The tension can be measured by an entry that says this was ‘the longest watch period ever experienced since the termination of hostilities, operational six and a half hours being released at 01.30 hrs’.

By the evening, Mosquitoes from 23 Squadron were on ‘stand by’ for the return of Charlie under the control of RAF Neatishead. Situated in the Norfolk Broads, Neatishead is the oldest operational radar station in the world. It began life in 1941 and became a GCI radar station the following year. In his station log, Squadron Leader S. L. Cruwys, reported how on 17 January one mosquito from 23 Squadron had been ‘scrambled just before midnight to intercept an unidentified high flying aircraft.’ Cruwys records how an attempt was made to close when contact was made at 18,000 feet but ‘the observer was unable to hold it as the target was jerking violently’[14]. Further contacts were obtained as the target fell rapidly to 2,000 feet, when both the blip and the mosquito disappeared below radar coverage.

The logbook of Eastern Sector HQ, adds further details:

“One Mosquito of No. 23 Sqdn, pilot F/L Kent, was at readiness at Wittering to attempt interception of the unidentified aircraft which has been plotted several times lately. At 2040 hrs the Bogey was plotted in WN 6038 [grid square]. The plot was at one time heading south and the Mosquito which had been brought to standby was returned to Readiness, but when the plot again headed into Eastern Sector area the Mosquito was scrambled at 2327 hrs. Although getting within 1-2 miles several times, no interception was made on the target which took violent evasive action. The plot faded at 0015 hrs and after patrolling on a North-South line for some time the aircraft returned to base at 0045 hrs.” [15]

The pilot of the mosquito was a Sheffield-born World War II night-fighter veteran, William Kent. His log book confirms the incident, with a red ink entry recording an unusual night sortie of 1 hour, 45 minutes – ‘a scramble interception’. In 2001 we were able to trace and interview Kent, who retired from the RAF at the rank of Group Captain. He recalled the incident clearly:

‘I, being one of the very few pilots with any wartime experience and therefore having some understanding of the request, yelled for my navigator and the duty ground crew and leapt off the ground in under four minutes. On a “scramble” we never listen to any briefings on the ops phone – speed in the air is paramount – and so I had no idea what was brewing until, climbing to height and taken over by the close controller, I was given a brisk brief on the R/T [radio telegraph]. The ORB record is correct except that on reflection with hindsight the unidentified “aircraft” was almost certainly not an aircraft. It lost height as stated and the airborne radar contact was far more difficult to establish and hold with the aircraft in descent pointing towards the ground. The navigator’s screen became swamped with ground returns and the blip was in amongst the cluttered screen, somewhere...” [16]

Kent’s encounter with ‘Charlie’ over East Anglia continued for 20 minutes as the ground controller supplied instructions and the navigator tried to capture the object on the Mosquito’s radar.

“At no time at any height despite sporadic radar contacts did I sight anything visually, but on a dark night closing on a target at a speed of 10–20 knots [11–23 mph], extreme care is needed to avoid colliding and then only by steering a few degrees off centre does one’s night vision show a darker silhouette – often frighteningly close!”

After loosing the ‘blip,’ the adventure ended and Kent continued to patrol the area without further success. The following day he discussed the incident with the Neatishead fighter controller and a report was sent to the commanding officer of 12 Group. They decided that the ‘unidentified aircraft’ was, most probably, a leaking meteorological balloon. The radar target, if this theory was correct, would have been produced by reflections from metal cannisters as the balloon dropped towards the ground. ‘The report, which I saw, had no comment except a margin sketch of a pricked balloon,’ Kent recalled.

Kent’s scepticism was typical of the RAF’s pragmatic attitude both to the ‘ghost plane’ and, in later years, towards the flying saucer enigma. Nevertheless, the intrusions continued and Charlie appeared again on the night of 23 January whilst three senior officers from the Central Fighter Establishment were visiting RAF Neatishead to control an interception exercise. This was cancelled when ‘an unidentified high altitude aircraft’ appeared on the GCI radar at 28,000 foot. Mosquitoes from 23 Squadron, who in normal circumstances would have been scrambled were unavailable as they were moving to RAF Coltishall. The nearest available aircraft, mosquitoes of 264 Squadron from RAF Linton-on-Ouse in Yorkshire, were scrambled but before they could reach the Norfolk coast Charlie had faded from the radar screen. [17] During the alert, Eastern Sector turned for help from 74 Squadron’s Meteors and Flight Lieutenant Lawrence was scrambled “to intercept an unidentified aircraft out to sea.” The ‘aircraft’ disappeared before an interception was possible and with the weather closing in, Lawrence’s Meteor suffered severe icing and was forced to return to Horsham St Faith. [18] »

The Air Ministry investigation

This was the third occasion that unidentified flying objects had been tracked by stations defending England’s east coast and the third time that interception attempts had ended in failure. On each occasion the mysterious blips came in over the North Sea towards Norfolk before descending from great height and disappearing beneath radar cover. Concern was mounting and the ORBs record how, as a direct result of the incidents on 23 January, Flying Officer Sewart of HQ Northern Signals Area spent six days at RAF Neatishead on a special mission to investigate the mysterious events. F/O Sewart’s assignment was to produce a report ‘on the unidentified high flying aircraft that have been plotted in recent months.’ [19]

Sewart’s report was completed on 27 January 1947 but is missing from the Public Record Office file where it is listed as an attachment to the station logbook. Summarising its contents, Squadron Leader Cruwys said ‘evidence appears to be strong’ that the unidentified tracks were caused by radio-sonde balloons released from Downham Market in Norfolk. Downham was a World War Two bomber airfield that was used by the USAAF’s 8th Weather Squadron in 1947 for the release of balloons for the study of the upper atmosphere. It can be inferred, in the absence of his original report, that Sewart had matched the release of radio-sondes with Charlie’s movements. He may have decided that balloons trapped by turbulent upper-air currents that were developing over southern England had been blown back towards their launch station in Norfolk. Their movements whilst trapped in upper air currents had taken radar operators by surprise and had led to the scramble of aircraft.

However statements made by the Air Ministry, firstly to the Press in April 1947 and again to the USAAF in July, flatly contradict Sewart’s conclusions and imply that the Air Staff remained open-minded about the identity of Charlie. Even Group Captain Kent’s account of the ‘unidentified aircraft’ ended with this comment: “I mentioned that a burst met balloon was a possibility, deduced afterwards from its ‘behaviour’...but at that time these things [flying saucers] were unheard of and not taken at all seriously.” [20]

Other expert opinion attributed the unusual radar blips to freak weather conditions. Operation Charlie coincided with the arrival on 24 January 1947 of a deep cold weather front over southern England, a fact that did not escape attention at the Air Ministry. Before the 1950s, knowledge of the role played by freak weather conditions in the production of ‘false’ echoes nick-named ‘angels’ was in its infancy. Although little understood at the time, the astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek, who was employed as a consultant to the US Air Force Project Blue Book, believed “atmospheric inversion effects” were the most likely explanation for the English ‘ghost plane’ reports. [21] This explanation is challenged in a technical assessment of the evidence by Martin Shough (see Appendix).

The Air Ministry may have decided it could dismiss the majority of the mysterious blips on its screens as balloons, but in July when the US authorities began to investigate reports of ‘flying saucers,’ the RAF continued to list the North Sea incident as ‘unexplained’. Dr Hynek’s notes on this case read: “The object observed here was obviously not astronomical. From the information given, it appears that this was definitely an aircraft..” [22] This raises an obvious question: if it was an aircraft, then where was it from?

According to Geoff Easterling the RAF’s prime suspect was a Russian intruder aircraft flying from a base in occupied Germany. However, if the speed and performance of the target tracked on 16 January 1947 recalled by David Richards (and apparently confirmed by the contemporary press reports) are correct, this becomes an unlikely proposition. Soviet aircraft were unreliable at long range, and it seems inconceivable that an intruder mission would risk an overflight of UK territory in such a reckless fashion during a period of extreme and unpredictable weather. In addition, Soviet versions of the US B-25 were capable of a maximum speed of 250-300 kts, a figure well within the interception ratio of the RAF Mosquito.

It remains unclear if further unidentified radar blips continued to plague the RAF as the ‘ghost plane’ era moved into the age of the ‘flying saucer.’ Entries in the logbooks of radar stations on the south coast of England describe a number of similar incidents during April and May, 1947. One entry from the logbook of RAF Rye, a CH station in Kent, reads: “...the most noteworthy track plotted was an unidentified aircraft which was plotted from 52 miles out to the maximum range of 186 miles.” [23] Group Captain Kent recalls: “I have no other sorties listed in my log books as ‘scramble intercepts’ such as that of 17 January 1947, but I did fly a few others against ‘odd’ and ‘strange’ blips as seen by ground radars in an around East Anglia. I flew at least one in daylight but nothing was seen.” [24]

When rumours concerning the panic of January 1947 leaked to the national newspapers in April the Air Ministry decided to deny all knowledge. A spokesman told the Daily Telegraph they were taking no further action. ‘We have found no evidence to support the reports at all,’ he said. The Yorkshire Post was less inclined to dismiss the mystery completely and its editorial looked at the problem from a different angle:

‘Radar has plotted some strange things in its time, from children’s kites and raindrops to formations of geese. But it surely never plotted a stranger thing than this. What is the aircraft? Speculation takes us into those regions where the scenes are laid for so many thrilling stories in the boys’ magazine. Is it a diamond or drug smuggler? Is it conveying a secret agent from one foreign Power to another? In that event it would of course have the secret papers and probably also a beautiful woman spy on board. Is it a guided missile?’

The newspaper compared the ghost plane mystery with the reports of phantom German Zeppelins that had circulated before the outbreak of World War I and observed: ‘It seems to be established that it is only at times of peculiar stress that the public is in the psychological state to receive and circulate such stories.’ The practical steps to solve the mystery were clear:

‘Fast RAF fighters must continue trying to intercept the visitor if it should return. Our air service has the fastest fighters in the world and should not find it impossibly difficult … meanwhile we may enjoy the atmosphere of mystery and imagination which surrounds the ghost aircraft.’ [25] »

Conclusion

The most intriguing reference to Operation Charlie is found not in the pages of a newspaper, but in the memoirs of the one-time head of Project Blue Book, Captain Edward Ruppelt. In his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, published in 1956, the retired officer devoted several pages to a description of an intelligence briefing document drawn up by Project Sign staff early in 1948. This was the legendary ‘Estimate of the Situation’ which listed a number of unexplained sightings and concluded that the most probable explanation “was that they [flying saucers] were interplanetary.” The estimate travelled upwards to the highest echelons of the US Air Force where the Chief of Staff, General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, batted it back. “The general wouldn’t buy interplanetary vehicles [and] the report lacked proof,” wrote Ruppelt. “Some months later it was completely declassified and relegated to the incinerator.” [26]

Controversy has surrounded the status of the Estimate ever since Ruppelt wrote these words. Not one single copy appears to have survived, and some have suggested it never existed. However, Ruppelt describes reading one copy that had escaped destruction, and he described it as “a rather thick document with a black cover...stamped across the front were the words TOP SECRET.”

Included in the Estimate was a collection of UFO reports that preceded Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of 24 June 1947. The report’s authors used these to support their interplanetary theory, arguing that pre-Arnold sightings could not be dismissed as hype or rumour triggered off by media stories. Among the cases used to prove this point were “the English ‘ghost airplanes’ that had been picked up on radar early in 1947.” [27]

This investigation into the British records has established that six months before Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, the RAF had logged its first official report of an ‘unidentified flying object.’ Furthermore, by July 1947 when the first sightings of ‘flying saucers’ were made in the USA, the Air Ministry remained unable to explain the intruder it had logged in January of that year. This implies that an exchange of intelligence on ‘unidentified flying objects’ between the USA and UK began in 1946-47 with the ghost rocket and ghost planes. Cold War historian Richard Aldrich writes that air power was the cutting-edge of post-war strategy “and it was appropriate that Anglo-American air intelligence was in turn the cutting edge of Western intelligence co-operation.” (28)

Air Intelligence files relating to ‘Operation Charlie’ cannot be traced at the Public Record Office or the RAF Air Historical Branch at Bentley Priory. However, documents at the US National Archive show the Air Ministry’s Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Intelligence), Air Vice Marshal Sir Thomas Elmhirst, working closely with his opposite number in the US Army Air Force (General George McDonald) during the ‘ghost rocket’ alarm in 1946. Whilst the Swedes were asking the RAF “to take all possible measures to prevent the Americans finding out about Swedish full co-operation in investigating the mysterious missiles,” Elmhirst was discreetly passing all intelligence on the subject to McDonald in Washington [28] . Given the level of co-operation that existed between the allies post-war, we can be confident that a dossier on what Ruppelt called ‘the English ghost planes’ (Operation Charlie) would have been shared at the highest level with the Americans when Project Sign was created. What the study contained and concluded remains a mystery.

Copyright 2002 David Clarke

Acknowledgements: We wish to thank all those who have assisted this research including Group Captain William Kent, Flight Lieutenant David Richards, Flight Lieutenant Geoff Easterling, Martin Shough, Jan Aldrich, Steven Payne and Mike Hooks of The Aeroplane.

Notes & References

1. Personal communication from G. Easterling, 27 August 2002.

2. Daily Mail (London), 29 April 1947: Associated Press report, 30 April (Portland Oregonian, 30 April 1947, Los Angeles Times, 1 May 1947).

3. Personal communication from Sir Edward Fennessy CBE, 28 November 2001.

4. Personal communication from D. Richards, January-February 2001.

5. Richards, op. cit.

6. PRO AIR 29/1370: Operations Record Book: Eastern Sector HQ, Horsham St. Faith, January 1947.

7. PRO AIR 29/1597: Operations Record Book: RAF Trimley Heath, January 1947.

8. PRO AIR 25/1113: Operations Record Book: HQ No 11 Group, Bentley Priory, January 1947.

9. Air Ministry memorandum, 8 August 1947 copied by US Army Air Force to FBI.

10. PRO AIR 29/1369: Operations Record Book, RAF Neatishead, January 1947.

11. Richards, op.cit.

12. Air Ministry memorandum, 8 August 1947.

13. PRO AIR 29/1930: HQ Northern Signals Area: Operations Record Books, RAF Skendleby, RAF Humberston, January 1947.

14. PRO AIR 29/1369

15. PRO AIR 29/1370.

16. Personal communication from Group Captain William Kent, RAF (retired), 24 June 2001.

17. PRO AIR 29/1369 and AIR 29/1370.

18. PRO AIR 29/1370.

19. PRO AIR 29/1369.

20. Kent, op. cit.

21. Personal communication from Mike Hall, Montgomery County Historical Society, 1 October 2000, quoting from Hynek’s papers.

22. Hall, op. cit.

23. PRO AIR 29/1967: Operations Record Book: HQ Southern Signals Area, May 1947.

24. Kent, op. cit.

25. Yorkshire Post (Leeds), 30 April 1947.

26. Ruppelt, Edward. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 41.

27. Ruppelt, op. cit.

28. Aldrich, Richard. The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War secret intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 213.

Source: http://www.uk-ufo.org/condign/histcharlie.htm

The prime witness in this case is U.S. Major Ben SHAFFER. The following is from a "STATEMENT OF WITNESS" as it can be found in the unclassified Blue Book files at www.nicap.org.

I, Ben SHAFFER, on the 29 July was returning with my family from a fishing trip in Idaho, we had not heard a radio or read a newspaper in the days we had been gone. About eight (8) miles south of Ennis, Montana, traveling from West Yellowstone to Ennis between 1400 and 1500 hours MST I noticed a dark colored object hovering over the mountains to the right of the highway. I slowed down and stopped the car, and as I did so the object formed a white cloud around itself. 

The distance was, as I would estimate it, three or four miles in a direct line and the clouds were about one thousand feet above the summit of the mountain. Shortly after that three smaller disk-like objects came bursting out of the clouds from different angles traveling at at an estimated two hundred miles per hour. Each of these objects made an arc in different directions and at the peak of the arc accelerated at a terrific speed and departed to a central point behind the clouds and disappeared. There was a trail of very hazy film of dark colored smoke. I had an eight-powered binocular when I was watching this.

I stopped two other cars, one from Arkansas and one from Ohio. The man in the car from Ohio had a pair of 50-power binoculars. We all, and I think there was about a dozen of us, watched with the naked eye and binoculars. Shortly after the three objects left the cloud five objects appeared on the right side of the cloud in a V-formation traveling slowly and then each of these in succession formed a small cloud around themselves. They changed formation from the "V" to single file and entered the big cloud one behind the other.

The phenomenon as sketched by Major SHAFFER with on top (white line added) a view of the "dark indefinite shaped object" and below the same object now enveloped in a white cloud with the three small "disk-like objects" shooting out from it and curling back in. To the right the five smaller "objects" that in turn developed clouds around them and moved in formation to the bigger cloud.

During this time I took colored moving pictures with a 8mm Bell and Howell camera and still pictures, black anc white, with a Kodax Retina camera. We watched this phenomena for almost 30 minutes and the whole time while we were watching them no other clouds formed in the sky in our range of vision. Upon the advice of a civilian friend the films, undeveloped, were turned over to Major [deleted - WVU] of the 29th Air Division at Great Falls AFB, Montana.

Along about the end of the 30 minutes on a mountain to the left of the highway and some six miles estimated from us another cloud suddenly appeared and the same phenomenon took place with objects leaving and returning

I wish to add that I am a Major in the Army Corps of Engineers Reserve and had a "Q" Clearance 1946 to 1948 while stationed with Z Division, Sandia Base, Albequerque, New Mexico.

According to Wikipedia a "Q clearance" is a United States Department of Energy security clearance specifically relating to atomic or nuclear related materials ("Restricted Data" under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954). The clearance was established in 1946.

As for what happened to Major SHAFFER's films: a teletype from Project Blue Book Lt. Anderson G. FLUES to the 29th Air Division ADC in Great Falls, Montana, on September 8, 1952, 16:30 Z (12:30 p.m. EDT) says: "Returning Kodachrome movie film concerning your FLYOBRPT [Flying Object Report - WVU] of 29 July 52 belong to Mr. [Ben Shaffer, Great Falls, Mont. - Brad SPARKS] today. Films impossible to analyze properly". Unfortunately, the Blue Book file on the Ennis case contains no copies or prints from either the photographs or the films.

On October 31, 1968, the University of Colorado submitted its final report on the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. After 18-months of scrutiny, the ad-hoc commission led by physicist Edward Condon said, “careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”

On January 8, 1969, when the New York Times broke the news of Condon’s findings, the “dean of science writers,” Walter Sullivan, sardonically labeled any who rejected the conclusion as “UFO enthusiasts.” In a follow-up article the next day, Sullivan added “Believers” to the veiled epithets for those who dared to stubbornly hold mystique for a topic that could be entirely explained by prosaic means.

For many of those “UFO enthusiasts,” including some who had initially worked on the project, the University of Colorado’s study was little more than a hitman sent forth by the Air Force to assassinate the UFO subject and end public discourse on the subject of mysterious airborne objects.

Successful in their bounty, less than a year after Condon’s conclusion, the Air Force shuttered its 21-year systematic study of UFOs – Project Blue Book. With this, the US government unceremoniously stepped away from an issue that had become an unsightly distraction to the socially turbulent 1960s and seething Cold War with the Soviet Union.

In an analogous throwback to modern complaints of “fake news;” intriguingly, Sullivan’s remarks, along with all the press stories on the Condon Report’s determination, were based on admittedly “fragmentary accounts of the principal conclusion” and a verifiably diluted 11-page summary that had been “leaked” to the Associated Press.

Exceeding Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace by more than 250-pages, it’s easy to assume few, if any, of the press would later read Condon’s entire 1485 page anthology. In fairness, any lack of consumption can not be attributed to lack of availability. As if torn from the egodystonic pages of an Aesop fable, in February 1969, the New York Times/ Bantam Books published and sold copies of the complete Condon Report. Even including “an exclusive introduction” by none other than Walter Sullivan.

Nevertheless, offering near-universal praise for the report and the government’s closing of Project Blue Book, as chief prosecutor in the court of public opinion, the news media helped shape what would be the social sentiment towards UFOs for generations to come.

To the accepted majority, the Condon Committee represented the last accepted scientific study of UFOs. The perception of Condon’s conclusions became the tipping point for the topic to be relocated to a place of no real value outside of entertainment.

For their part, UFOs were seemingly unconcerned with the social sentiment. Not only did sightings post-Condon fail to stop, but the frequency of likely misidentifications vs. unexplainable sightings continued at a remarkably consistent rate as Project Blue Book had recorded during its nearly two-decades of operation.

With a propensity toward sporadic airborne displays, these Unidentified Flying Objects seemingly transcended all cultural, ideological, and geographical boundaries. Their only outward consistency appeared to be an unwavering commitment to rejecting current paradigms and generally behaving in ways that seemed entirely alien to human understanding.

However, both the actual and alleged sightings of mysterious airborne objects became a moot point. Public consensus had accepted the argument from authority. The disconnect between the observed and the observer only widened, and the “UFO Enthusiast” became regulated to society’s fringe. For scientists, academics, pilots, government employees, or generally anyone who desired a reputable professional stature, to be associated with having an interest in UFOs became a fatal albatross.

Consequently, thanks to being unbridled by credentialed authority, over the ensuing decades, “UFO Enthusiasts” evolved into a “community” and largely conformed to cultural status exacted upon it. The five cities of refuge for “UFO enthusiasts” were located in the lands of magical thinkers, crackpots, paranoid conspiracists, subjective “experiencers,” and a rare reclusive band of nihilistically curious.

In a rather ironic twist, 48-years and a day to when the Air Force closed down Project Blue Book, a brazen challenger to the UFO status quo unexpectedly emerged.

In arguably the most significant mainstream event for the UFO topic in nearly 50-years, on December 16, 2017, the New York Times revealed an obscure program within The Pentagon called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program or AATIP. Reportedly, this shadowy program had secretly been investigating UFOs under the guise of former senior DoD official, Luis Elizondo. Complementing the Time’s expose, were three DoD videos depicting what The Pentagon would later formally acknowledge was “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” or UAP.

Entirely new generations of people and government appendages suddenly re-discovered the decades-old UFO enigma.

By summer of 2020, the DoD acknowledged it had an officially backed task force to examine UAP. The chief political overseers of America’s Intelligence Community, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, had, through legislative decree, asked the Director of National Intelligence to provide a comprehensive report on how the government is handling UFOs. By early May of this year, the Office of the Inspector General had even announced they too would be throwing their hat in the ring and evaluating the DoD’s “actions regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.”

Sitting Senators, former directors of the CIA and National Intelligence, former presidents, and even NASA have all since come forward suggesting that something mysterious is apparently soaring through the skies with impunity.

Is this current UFO blitzkrieg simply fueled by the unbridled fantasies of rebellious “believers,” as Condon reportedly implied over five decades ago? Considering some of these “believers” have held, or currently hold, pinnacle positions in the halls of American power, this is frankly more alarming than any foreseeable UFO reality.

In this four-part series, The Debrief will explore the lives of several individuals and how the UFO subject has influenced them. Each person represents different rungs on the ladder of U.S. military power. Their unanticipated experience with the UFO subject spans nearly 60 years.

In this endeavor, The Debrief wanted to see if there was any truth to be had with the UFO subject or if the Condon Committee’s now 52-year-old conclusion still applied.

Ultimately, we would discover Condon’s conclusion was, surprisingly, very much correct. That conclusion, however, isn’t what most people think and has been largely overlooked.

Originally a pineapple and grapefruit plantation before the U.S. Army converted it into a munitions depot during WWII; roughly 14 miles west of cobblestoned Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, is an inconspicuous 2,250 acres that has quietly served as one of the epicenters for America’s covert signals intelligence collection.

Verbosely titled- Naval Security Group Activity Sabana Seca (NSGA), Naval Base- for at least five decades, the site served as a nerve center for spying on communications coming out of Latin America and the Caribbean. Officially NSGA Sabana Seca closed down in 2003. However, leaked documents show the NSA and CIA were still using this patch of tropics for signals intelligence as late as 2013.

Ironically, recent history’s most famous UFO canary, former senior Pentagon official Luis Elizondo, was likely once stationed at NSGA Sabana Seca. According to public records, this would have been in the early 2000s, when Elizondo was working for one of the Intelligence Community’s surreptitious provinces. Years before he’d find himself being drawn into UFOs and the now infamous AATIP. Though Elizondo will neither confirm nor deny if this is true.

Regardless, in the mid-1960s, a young Navy cryptologist and Petty Officer Second Class, Richard “Lee” Walther, would indeed find himself working out of the reclusive NSGA Sabana Seca. Nearly 2,000 miles from his hometown of Egg Harbor City, New Jersey, Walther had arrived at the spy post in October 1962 and just in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis. “Looking back on it, as a young kid, I didn’t fully appreciate what an important time in history this was. But yeah, a lot was going on for sure,” reminisced Walther in a phone call with me.

“Everything we did was classified. I held a Top Secret clearance, and everything we did was on a need-to-know basis,” Walther recalled his time working at Sabana Seca’s ‘Radio Shack.’” “I was classified as an A branch or Administrative, but I did most of my work in the interpretive branch division, where we had a bunch of linguists, Portuguese, Russian, and of course Spanish. Back then, we were looking for foreign intelligence to try and figure out what the enemy might be doing to us or around us.”

The gravity of the United States and Russia threatening to plummet the world into nuclear armageddon may not have fully sunk in for the young Walther. However, a series of mysterious events in the fall of 1964 has since plagued him for over 50 years.

“Among the things we did was to monitor a lot of air traffic and radio communications all over the area. This included receiving dispatches periodically from ships that were stationed in the greater Caribbean Sea. In late summer and fall, of 1964, we began receiving reports of UFO sightings and activity involving both Navy and Air Force pilots in the area,” divulged Walther.

“This UFO business sort of came out of the blue. I remember it was the subject of some laughter and joking. A few of us who were, you know, neutral on it didn’t know what to think of it. And that’s where I am today. But with this USS Gyatt business, I really don’t know what to make of it.”

With a remarkably sharp memory, the now 77-year-old Walther told me how in late November 1964, his supervisor shared with him the remarkable details of something inexplicable that had been vexing several Naval ships off the coast of Puerto Rico, including the Gearing-class destroyer: The USS Gyatt.

“Richard Yeck was the Lieutenant I worked with most closely, and he was the one who made me aware of this whole USS Gyatt business. That’s how I got my hands on the material. We had a very strict policy that nothing came in and nothing went out of the ‘Shack.’ But this UFO stuff was an outlier, so Lt. Yeck gave me the green light to hold on to the materials.”

Walther had been allowed to keep copies of two group traffic intelligence reports filed by Navy San Juan Operations Officer, Captain William. R. Sisley. During the Korean War, Capt. Sisley had been squadron commander of Strike Fighter Squadron 83 (VFA-83), the “Rampagers.”

Walther shared with me copies of these original onion-skin intelligence reports that he’d been holding onto for almost six decades. Totaling only 4pages, they offered a glimpse into a remarkable series of events that have since become less than a footnote in the annals of history.

Perplexing records, including visual and radar observations of a series of unexplained encounters that sound eerily similar to a more recent UFO event occurring in 2004 off America’s West Coast and now famously known as the “Nimitz Encounters.”

“It wasn’t simply the visual and radar contacts by the pilot. There were radar operators on the ship who tracked this thing as well. Over days, not just one episode. It was an ongoing series of events,” remarked Walther.

The USS Gyatt’s “Unknown Aircraft” Not UFO

No known records from the Air Force, Navy, DIA, or CIA suggest an attempt to follow-up or identify what type of aircraft was buzzing around America’s strategic strongpoint to Latin America. Now-declassified copies of the President’s Daily brief show reconnaissance images of Cuba captured by F-8 Crusaders in November 1964. Absent from these intel reports is any mention that these same F-8’s were moonlighting as UFO hunters in the evenings.

Even if U.S. intelligence agencies in the 1960s weren’t interested in solving the mystery, it should be relatively easy to narrow down who that delta-wing intruder pestering the skies near Puerto Rico might have been now. Yet, probable explanations for what the USS Gyatt encountered 57 years ago still remain elusive.

In 1964, Air Defense Command (ADC) had ruled out the YF-12A, the twin-seat prototype version of then-very Top Secret Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft. However, the YF-12 and A-12 “Archangel” were uniquely delta-shaped and capable of speeds exceeding 2,000 mph, with a service ceiling of 85,000 feet. Equally, there were operational prototypes of both high-performance aircraft by 1962.

Fact-checking ADC, I reached out to radar systems expert, black budget aerospace veteran, and author T.D Barnes. Barnes had been part of the CIA recruited team of virtuosos who developed the YF-12, A-12, and later SR-71.

Backing up the previous assertion, Barnes told me in November 1964, neither the YF-12 nor A-12 would have been zooming around and taunting fellow naval forces in the Caribbean. In remarkable detail, Barnes recounted to me the A-12’s first flight outside of Area-51.

In a flight codenamed SCOTCH MIST, the A-12 flew from Area-51 to McCoy Air Force Base near Orlando, Florida, on August 4, 1965. Nine months after the USS Gyatt’s mysterious “stranger.” Before this, Barnes said, “the A-12 had flown only out of Area 51 with an altitude of 4,462 feet [and] I’m not aware of any other delta-wing aircraft at the time.”

The other problem with the A-12 or YF-12 comes from Woodbury’s description of a single bright light at the craft’s tail, which indeed sounds suspiciously like the afterburner of a performance jet. Like the SR-71 “Blackbird,” the Archangel was powered by a pair of Pratt & Whitney J58-1 turbojet engines. Woodbury would have seen two bright lights and not the single “fiery cone” he reported had it been the spy plane.

The other roughly triangular or “delta-shaped” aircraft capable of high-altitude speeds exceeding Mach 2.2, the air-launched Lockheed D-21 drone and SR-71, didn’t take their first flights until December 22, 1964, three days after Quintanilla’s conclusion. The D-21 piggybacking on the SR-71, again all shrouded from prying eyes inside Area-51.

Ruling out a secretive U.S. program – that for reasons which presently escape logic had decided to repeatedly pester its fellow sailors – that all but leaves the Soviet Union as being the only other power capable of producing a high-performance aircraft like what was described.

Though a high-swept wing and not delta-wing aircraft, by March 1964, the USSR did have at least one prototype Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 “Foxbat.”

Considered one of the fastest aircraft ever built, only the A-12, SR-71, and experimental X-15, was capable of out-racing the Foxbat. However, the MiG-25’s maximum high-altitude speed rating of Mach 3.3 or 2500 mph was largely theoretical. The jet’s two Tumansky R-15B turbojet engines tended to overheat at high speeds, making the MiG-25’s actual performance speed much slower than it looked on paper. Again, like the A-12, had Woodbury been chasing a Foxbat, he should have seen two bright lights at the craft’s rear, not one.

It’s also inconceivable that 7 months after the prototype’s first flight, the Soviet Union would have had a Foxbat tooling around and harassing American forces in the Caribbean. Ultimately, the MiG-25 wouldn’t enter service until 1970, having a limited operational history before the USSR ended production in 1984.

With a slightly bemused frown, author, defense journalist, and former aviation editor of Jane’s Defence, Nick Cook, shook his head in disagreement when I asked him how likely this was a secretive Russian delta-wing performance aircraft of unknown type in 1964. More importantly, an aircraft that has somehow eluded public knowledge for nearly 60 years.

“Virtually impossible,” Cook said, before recounting to me a time just before the collapse of the Soviet Union when he was able to acquire a performance manual for the then-secret Ekranoplan wing-in-ground effect craft for a bottle of Johnny Walker whiskey.

When Project Blue Book closed shop in 1969, the USS Gyatt case was never counted amongst the handful of reports determined to be “unidentified” because it was labeled an “unidentified aircraft.”

“I was amused by their choice of terminology,” scoffed Walther. “With malice and aforethought, I’m sure they selected innocuous terminology to soften the blow if you will. Make it more palatable for readers.”

What the USS Gyatt encountered in November 1964 remains no less of a mystery today than it did almost six decades ago.

“Are we all going to die with no answers?”

For Walther, he sees parallels between the USS Gyatt’s UFO encounters in ’64 and current UFO or UAP reports that are trickling out from military pilots today.

“The performance of the bogey with Gyatt wasn’t just described by the pilots, but also tracked on highly sophisticated radar. At least top-of-the-line for back then,” said Walther. “With the more recent sightings that we know about, the equipment’s only gotten better and better, so we can say with scientific certainty that these things are real. Yet, we’re still asking ‘what is it?”

Walther stresses he didn’t hold onto the Gyatt UFO messages for decades because he’s bent on proving aliens are visiting earth. In fact, the obstinate inclination to equate “UFO” or “UAP” as being “aliens” by both “believers” and skeptics is primarily the reason why determinations such as “unidentified aircraft” become oddly hollow but satisfying conclusions.

“There’s a lot of skepticism, almost derision, of anyone who brings up the subject, let alone is a believer,” sighed Walther. “If you’re a ‘believer,’ you’re thought to be some kind of kook, and I think it silences a lot of people. Including knowledgeable pilots and people who have first-hand experience with this phenomena. It just leads to more ignorance because we’re not gathering up all of the data that’s out there and available for discussion and intelligent critique.”

I had not mentioned Walter Sullivan’s use of the phrase when Walther gave his criticism of the label “believers.” His organic rebuke of the term serves as a testament to the lasting impact words can have on collective society.

During one of our early phone conversations, Walther, who has the memory of a person you wouldn’t want to borrow money from, gave me a half-a-dozen or so names of former sailors he worked with at Sabana Seca. Scouting the list of Navy vets, most having lived full lives into their 80’s and 90’s, I’d discover all but one were now deceased.

The shameless notice that time waits for no one reminded me of something an unnamed DoD official told The New Yorker’s, Gideon Lewis Kraus. “There are guys who spent their lives studying stuff like Roswell and died with no answers. Are we all going to die with no answers?”

I asked Walther what he hoped to see happen with the government and public renewed interest in UFOs or UAP. “I’m an old man now, but I’m still bewildered by all of this stuff. There’s this cloud of skepticism if you believe this stuff occurs, and you’re a kook, and what you say is disregarded. I really have a problem with that,” Walther replied. “What we need is people to forget about their prejudices and biases, and just simply look at this kind of like it’s a challenge. Then let’s figure out what’s going on here.”

Coming, Thursday, June 24, 2021 – Part II: Interlopers over the Atlantic.

Follow and connect with author Tim McMillan on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan

Links to Original USS Gyatt UFO Documents

Message Traffic Report.pdf

USS_Gyatt_UFO_1.pdf

USS_Gyatt_UFO_2.pdf

USS_Gyatt_UFO_3.pdf 

Ryan Graves’ rapid-fire New England accent is contrasted by an unfeigned pensiveness, conveying he’s the type of person who is both attentively calm under pressure yet not afraid to pull the trigger. Square jawed with perfectly placed dirty blonde hair and prominent cleft chin, if Graves wasn’t, in fact, a former Navy fighter pilot, you might easily assume he was cast to play one in a movie. His modest and personable demeanor tattle-tell that during his 11 years as a F/A-18 “Super Hornet” pilot, Graves was likely more Pete “Maverick” Mitchell than Tom “Iceman” Kazansky.

Many kids dream of one day becoming a fighter pilot. For Graves, this ambition didn’t emerge until the end of his junior year in college, when a summer internship led to the sudden realization he’d been academically preparing himself for a boring career in fire protection engineering. Pondering on what was the exact opposite of boring, Graves says he settled on being a Navy fighter pilot.

Accepted into the Officer Candidate School as an aviator candidate, Graves progressed through the Navy’s advanced strike fighter pipeline. After nearly three years of initial flight screening, preflight indoctrination, primary flight training, advanced flight training, and specialized strike syllabus, Graves successfully realized his goal of landing an unboring job by virtue of landing on a moving aircraft carrier.

“FOBS” was the callsign Graves went by during his years piloting one of the world’s premier multi-role fighter aircraft. “That’s all I’m going to tell you,” Graves chuckles politely. A reminder that pilot monikers almost always have a devilishly humorous and often embarrassing origin story.

When a collegiate Graves longed for an unboring career, that vocation, understandably, didn’t involve UFOs. Yet, in the words of associate editor of the Washington Post David Maraniss: “Life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder.”

A synthesis of these existential forces has led to Graves inexplicably finding himself married to the UFO topic. Though, at times, he likely feels this union is more 1998 Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra than a “Notebook” kind of love. “I still can’t believe sometimes that I came out talking about this,” Graves said with bemused doubt in a phone call with me.

Graves’ relationship with UFOs began in 2014 and 2015 as a part of Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-11, the “Red Rippers,” and the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group. While conducting work-ups off the Virginia and Florida coasts, Graves would later recount how he and his fellow Naval Aviators began to detect mysterious objects tooling around the airspace, often for hours on end.

In late 2017, early 2018, To the Stars Academy released three brief grainy black-and-white videos captured by the infrared targeting pods of F/A-18s in 2004 and 2015. The images showed an indistinct “something” that purportedly was a UFO or, in modern Department of Defense parlance, “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP).

Two of these videos, colloquially dubbed “Go Fast” and “Gimbal,” displayed one of the objects that had perplexed Graves and his fellow Red Rippers back in 2015. The DoD would later authenticate the clips and confirm the objects in the videos were indeed “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

The then 30-year-old Navy Lieutenant, Graves, did not film either of the two widely popular and hotly debated videos. However, airborne at the time of their recording, Graves watched those same indistinct “somethings” on his own jet’s advanced avionics suite.

Graves was mum on his UFO affair in the first couple of years after the videos were released. Finally, in July 2020, the relationship between Graves and UFOs became officially known. Freshly out of the Navy, Graves stepped from the shadows and onto the front page of The New York Times and the History Channel’s TV program Unidentified. In both outlets, he’d offer additional details and more context of the mysterious airborne objects that had been darting around several hundred miles off the coasts of Virginia and Florida.

In May 2021, Graves would once more recount how Navy pilots had encountered UAP on a near-daily basis. Only this time Graves told his story on arguably the most esteemed American TV news magazines: CBS’s 60 Minutes. Airing just a month before the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s deadline to provide Congress with a report on UAP, once 60 minutes blessed off on it, the rest of the mainstream media were off to the races. Suddenly, news outlets couldn’t get enough UFOs.

Graves and I spoke on the phone just a few days after his big appearance on 60 minutes. “I thought I got a lot of attention after the New York Times, but I think this tops it,” Graves chuckled. “It’s all been very positive, though. Which has been good.”

Unrestrained by newspaper editors or TV producers, Graves patiently detailed for me what he and his fellow military pilots had encountered years prior. “There were these everyday occurrences off of the East Coast, where we’d go up, and we’d see them on our radar. We’d see them on our FLIR and very rarely with our eyeballs. This was a daily issue,” Graves stressed.

Initially, Graves says the appearance of these odd interlopers roughly coincided with the F/A-18’s upgrade to the AN/APG-79, active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars. “Sometimes you get reflections off clouds with older radars, so we were somewhat accustomed to seeing stuff on the radar that didn’t necessarily mean an object was actually there. The APG-79 wasn’t supposed to have this issue, but it was pretty new, so we just assumed at first this was a bug in the software,” said Graves.

Rather quickly, however, pilots began to realize whatever these radar returns were, they weren’t bugs in the system. “We started locking these things up as solid returns and then slaving the FLIR to it, meaning you’re seeing an IR [infrared] source. That’s when we realized this wasn’t necessarily some type of radar malfunction. There were physical objects out there.”

The AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR targeting pod capturing these objects is a multi-sensor, electro-optical system that incorporates a low-light television camera, target laser rangefinder/designator, laser spot tracker, and thermographic camera.

All objects emit a certain amount of black body radiation as a function of their temperature. The higher an object’s temperature, the more infrared black-body radiation is emitted. The sophisticated thermographic component of the ATFLIR converts these infrared emissions into an image the same way a typical camera forms an image using visible light.

Unlike the free-fall bomb runs and dramatic dogfights of WWII, modern air warfare involves delivering precision-guided munitions and “high-noon shootouts,” meaning he who “sees” the enemy first typically wins. Consequently, electro-optical systems, like the ATFLIR, have become staple pieces of hardware in modern military aircraft. The systems are integrated with other sophisticated avionics, including radar, all in hopes of providing the modern warfighter with a superior degree of situational awareness.

Graves explained the objects had a distinctive radar signature, which would allow the pilots to recognize them whenever they’d pop up on their integrated situational awareness page. “There were some distinct things we’d notice. Typically they were stationary, but sometimes they were moving, rarely at slightly supersonic speeds, but most of the time, they weren’t going incredibly fast,” Graves explained.

“We have what’s called a target aspect indicator, which is basically a line that comes off the radar track that represents the vector of the target, or what direction it’s moving. When these things were stationary, the aspect indicator kind of jumped around. For example, it would be going to the 12 o’clock position on one pass, then suddenly at the 6 0’clock, 3 o’clock, etc. This would maybe make sense for a stationary target. But we saw this same type of jitteriness when they were moving targets as well. The target aspect wasn’t smooth like an aircraft.”

Going back decades, the vast majority of UFO sightings last mere seconds. This volatile transience and randomness are among the most significant reasons why many UFO events go unexplained. It is also why rapid acceleration has become the de-facto defining characteristic of what is a “UFO.”

Nevertheless, in the last several years, after speaking with pilots, radar operators, and air warfare officers, when more enduring data is obtained -more often than not, thanks to increasingly sophisticated air defense systems – this same “jitteriness” Graves described often comes up.

Another military pilot, who is still on active duty and not authorized to speak on the record, described to me a sighting they had of an object that was “violently and erratically maneuvering” as it traveled through the air. “It was darting around like a housefly,” they said.

These erratic maneuvers witnesses describe seem nonsensical and frankly “alien.” However, these random movement patterns are actually pervasive and found naturally in astronomy, biology, and physics. In continuous probability distribution, these movements are mathematically defined as “Lévy Flight.”

Studies have shown that when ocean predators cannot find food, they begin traveling along long trajectories mixed with short, random movements, called the “Levy flight foraging hypothesis.” In a study performed over 15 years, analysis of 12 million movements showed that numerous marine predator species engage in Levy flight when seeking food. Additional published research has shown birds, and even primordial humans, following paths of Levy flight when in heterogeneous environments.

Whether or not this is merely a confounding variable, false dichotomy, or an overlooked distinctive characteristic of UFO events is anyone’s guess. Even if more substantive data showed these objects traveling in patterns of Levy flight, speculatively, it would only suggest they “viewed” the skies as an open-range domain and not as carefully planned air traffic control grids and predetermined flight paths. It would not inherently help identify what UAP represents.

One might also surmise it would mean the objects are “searching” for something, similar to animals foraging for food. Of course, this requires continued leaps into a land of conjecture. A realm I personally prefer to avoid.

Now, Graves cautions he couldn’t state for a fact the objects were actually physically displacing and traveling in new directions. “Our computer was showing us its direction of travel was jittery. Like it was walking a line, and then it was suddenly walking a line in another direction. But I can’t say it was physically moving in that direction.” However, the analogy of a housefly did resonate with what some of Graves’ fellow pilots said they had experienced.

“A lot of pilots would see these things on radar and go try to check it out. Very rarely, though, would they physically see anything because it was like you described with a housefly. When they’d get close, the things would move a little bit up or down. Just enough so you’d miss them,” said Graves. “To be fair, it’s also difficult to see a small object that’s stationary when you’re going by at 250 to 300 knots.”

On the few rare occasions pilots did catch a glimpse, the objects were oddly described as looking like a cube in a sphere. A shape that could hardly be considered aerodynamic by accepted principles of flight physics.

In 2019, defense journalist Tyler Rogoway put forth the theory that the “cube in a sphere” pilots saw could have been airborne radar reflectors. Rogoway shared a 1945 U.S. patent of an “Airborne Corner Reflector,” which depicted a radar reflector inside a collapsible balloon that, indeed, looked like a cube inside a sphere. The CIA had used similar submarine-launched balloons to test Soviet radar capabilities in the early 1960s under Project PALLADIUM.

In 2019, I spoke with retired CIA executive S. Eugene “Gene” Poteat. During his 30 years with the agency, Poteat ran many technical programs for the CIA, including being the program manager for the sensor platforms on the U-2 and A-12 spy planes. In the 1960s, Poteat also founded and ran Project PALLADIUM.

During several communications, Poteat explained to me the premises of PALLADIUM. “We wanted to determine the USSR’s ability to detect small targets. It was ultimately to see if the Soviets would be able to detect the A-12 or SR-71,” said Poteat. “The idea was to trigger Soviet early warning radars based in Cuba by producing false radar targets from an electronic warfare aircraft we were operating nearby. Then a submarine that was working with us would surface and release the calibrated spheres up and into the path of the oncoming false aircraft.”

Poteat told me the sub-launched radar reflective spheres they used differed in size and would have more likely been mistaken for a flying saucer than a “cube in a sphere.” With the 2015 Navy encounters, Poteat said he found the incidents “interesting,” but he would want to see more of the avionics data before giving an opinion.

Considering the objects would engage in evasive maneuvers, occasionally be seen flying in formation, and sometimes traveling at close to supersonic speeds, if what Graves and the other pilots were encountering were radar-reflectors, they definitely weren’t any conventional ones.

When it comes to the “Gimbal” video, Graves explained the brief clip, which was filmed roughly 300 miles off the coast of Florida in January 2015, shows something different than the persistent “jittery” objects pilots had become accustomed to seeing.

“We have a situational awareness page in the jets that give us a combined picture of all the plane’s sensor data. It’s kind of like a God’s eye view,” said Graves. “So when that FLIR footage they call the Gimbal was filmed, what you don’t see in the video that was released was there were five or six other aircraft flying in an imperfect wedge formation.”

Graves explained the wedge formation these objects were traveling in isn’t the type of pattern you would expect to see military aircraft fly, with the exception of in airshows or aerial displays. He also said the aircraft in the wedge formation had the same “jittery” signature as the objects previously seen near the Virginia coast.

Though the 34-second “Gimbal” video doesn’t show the wedge formation, one of the F/A-18 pilots hints at their presence in the accompanying audio. “There’s a whole fleet of them! Look on the SA,” exclaims the pilot. The “SA” being the Situational Awareness page, or “God’s eye view” mentioned by Graves.

“The wedge formation was flying, let’s call it north, then they turned their return radius right into the other direction, which is how aircraft turn. We have to bite into the air. So they turn in the other direction and keep going. Meanwhile, the ‘Gimbal’ object that was following behind them suddenly stopped and waited for the wedge formation to pass. Then it tilted up like you can see in the clip, and that’s when my video cut out, but it just kept following the other five or six, doing like a racetrack pattern,” Graves stated, explaining what isn’t shown on the public “Gimbal” video.

Every time pilots encountered these mysterious interlopers over the Atlantic, Graves says the objects never gave off any transponder signal identifying themselves. “No IFF or any interrogation mode and no emissions whatsoever. At least not that I’m aware of, except for reflectivity of some kind to be picked up on radar and infrared,” said Graves.

Referring to the “Gimbal” video, Graves said, “I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands of aircraft on the FLIR [forward looking infrared]. I spent a lot of time looking at the FLIR in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Some have proposed that the object filmed in the “Gimbal” video could have been a distant plane or commercial airliner. Graves doesn’t discount the potential for even highly-trained fighter pilots to make mistakes, but given the totality of the circumstances, the “Gimbal” having been a mundane distant aircraft seems like a bit of a stretch.

“I’m not going to say that we’re infallible. I mean, we’re all humans up there, trying to do the best job that we can. That being said, we’re using highly integrated systems in the aircraft,” said Graves. “We have many things telling us what something is out there. For example, with the Link 16, it gives us a data link allowing us to see where everyone is. I’ve got to be careful here and can’t get into too many details, but we can share data with each other so we can all see what everyone else is seeing.”

“On that particular day, the day the Gimbal was filmed, we were involved in a large air-to-air mission. You’ve got anywhere from 10 to 12 jets in the air wing going off to an area to do a mission. Then you’ve got a group of aircraft overhead the boat acting as the aerial refuelers. When my buddy took that video, he was heading back to the ship, and then here goes this thing like 40 miles away from the boat. It’s not in the data link. All the radars are reporting it, but it’s nothing popping up identifying what type of aircraft it is or whether it’s friend or foe. Then you’ve also got the five or six other objects in the wedge formation. We were like 300 miles out off the coast. It’s hard for me to imagine it was just another jet in the system.”

Some have also claimed the “Gimbal” object was traveling at mind-blowing speeds. But, Graves told me, in actuality, the exact opposite is true.

“It was going like 120 knots, basically stationary. None of our jets are just going to be sitting there stationary at 120 knots. I forget the altitude, maybe like 20,000 feet, but that’s really slow. Maybe in a full dogfight, if you’re a good pilot, you could get down to maybe 80 knots without stalling the aircraft, but you’re probably borderline stall, and you’re going to be pure vertical, or at least close to 70 degrees nose up,” said Graves.

The idea these objects were traveling at extraordinary hypersonic speeds makes for a great story. However, Graves explained something doesn’t have to be traveling an excess of 3,000 mph for it to still be impressive. For him and his fellow pilots, typically, the objects’ extreme slow speeds and extended flight time made them so perplexing.

Graves’ point that something doesn’t need to show “otherworldly” speed to be impressive, can be likened to riding a motorcycle. True skill isn’t riding a motorcycle fast, because self-stability occurs whenever a bike reaches a speed. Therefore going faster increases the chances of a bike contributing to its own stability. Conversely, trying to maintain balance while going at slow speeds is a more difficult task. So keeping a bike upright while moving forward at 2 to 3 MPH is actually more impressive than zipping along at 150 MPH.

“I guess it’s physically possible that when we weren’t looking, one would drop to ocean-level, and a new one would replace it, giving the appearance of a single aircraft staying airborne for hours at a time. However, in my observation, it appeared like they were pretty much airborne for as long as they wanted to be,” said Graves.

Graves told me pilots almost exclusively encountered the mysterious interlopers over the ocean, between roughly 10 to 300 miles off the coast. “I don’t think we ever saw them over land, but to be fair, we rarely flew over land,” specified Graves. “How far out they were, plus the altitudes and time in the air, basically all but rules out them being commercial drones.”

Another theory proposed is that pilots may have been encountering some type of advanced electronic warfare system. Something similar to what Gene Poteat and the CIA were doing with Project PALLADIUM by injecting false information into the jet’s avionic systems. One problem with this theory is the few occasions pilots visually saw the objects or captured them on the ATFLIR targeting pod.

According to Dr. Xavier Maldague, an electrical engineer and professor at the University Laval whose expertise is in infrared thermography approaches and image processing, it would be challenging to inject false imagery into the F/A-18’s electro-optical sensors.

“At the optical level, using a fake scene would be very difficult. Especially because all objects do emit some sort of infrared energy, so difficult to fool. And a dynamic scene would be even worse,” Dr. Maldague told me in an email. “One way to do it would be at the signal level, but of course, you [would] need access to camera wiring or try to scramble the radio link. A simple uniform hot background would be possible, well probably (depending on the distance).”

Optoelectronic engineer and professor of materials engineering at the University of Manchester, Dr. Coskun Kocabas, told me “spoofing” of infrared imaging would have to involve some type of external masking, rather than remotely hacking the system.

“There are fake infrared targets that look like real military vehicles on infrared cameras. They do it by locally heating a screen or inflatable balloon. But this is not related to the camera; they mimic the thermal emission of an object,” said Kocabas.

News of the mysterious encounters would eventually reach The Pentagon, ultimately leading to Graves recounting events for senior defense officials, congressional staffers, and members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Unbeknownst to Graves, he would tell his story to another former military aviator, turned senior DoD official, during one of these briefings. The official would later tell me they were so compelled by Graves and the other military veterans’ accounts, they’d later find themselves defending the pilots in a private “fighter pilots only” social media group when one member disputed their claims.

“I’m a fighter pilot, and I’m very familiar with the systems being used. I simply don’t have an explanation for what I’m looking at when you’ve got multiple sensor systems all picking it up,” the now-former senior advisor told me. The official asked not to be named because of their current employer and not out of embarrassment for supporting pilots’ claims on UAP.

“He is as credible as can be. A total professional,” one of Graves’ former Navy colleagues told me. The fellow former military aviator similarly asked not to be named due to their current employer, stressing it had nothing to do with an unwillingness to speak in support of Graves or out of concern for the claims of UAP.

Graves says he understands why people, especially other fighter pilots, might be critical of his accounts of UAP. “It doesn’t hurt my feelings to hear that some people might be critical, but at the same time, it’s really nice to hear some people are willing to stand up for us or make a statement alongside me,” said Graves.

Conversations about what pilots encountered in 2014 and 2015, or UFOs/UAP in general, are marred with theories of aliens or other conceptualized forms of exotic non-human visitors. As a result, both UFO enthusiasts and critics often engage in the types of spirited and polarized debate typically reserved for politics. Likewise, many media outlets often include quotes from self-styled “debunkers,” astrophysicists, or astronomers in attempts to provide fair and unbiased coverage. All discussing how unlikely it is that earth is being visited by advanced beings from another realm.

Void from these discussions is that, similar to Lee Walther, the former Navy cryptologist from part one of our series, Graves has never once mentioned having the opinion that these mysterious objects were alien visitors.

Instead, Graves has taken a reasonably pragmatic and unromantic stance. “Friends will ask, ‘What do you really think it was,’ and I tell them, I don’t know what it was,” said Graves. “There are some answers that are higher probability than others, but I try my best not to form a direction either way. I try to be as unbiased as an observer as possible.”

“I’ve given my account, but that’s all I’ve got to give. Some people want the answer to what this was, but like I said, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer that I can give,” said Graves during one of our recent conversations.

Graves implied frustration reminded me of the conversation I had with Alex Dietrich. “After I’ve told the account, some people will say, ‘But what was it?,” Dietrich told me with a hint of annoyance when discussing her sharing of the bizarre encounter with a “Tic Tac” shaped object off the Southern California coast in 2004. “I’ve done my part. So now it’s up to someone else to figure out what it was. Because I’ve already said, I don’t know. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.”

Graves takes a tone of frank sincerity when discussing his reasons for coming forward and discussing the unusual events. “First of all, this was an everyday safety risk for us. So my first goal for speaking out was to express that the men and women I flew with are dealing with a safety issue that the Navy was laughing at. That’s a big problem for me. It’s not acceptable.”

During the 2015 events, one aircrew had a near mid-air collision with one of the unidentified “cube in a sphere” shaped objects. Then, within the last year, Graves says another pilot he served with told him they had a near-miss with an object that looked “pretty much the same” as what pilots saw six years ago.

Within the last six months, Graves told me of a former flight student of his who graduated and made it to the fleet. According to the newly minted fighter pilot, he told Graves, “they’re still out here.”

Given the persistence of these enigmatic objects, aside from the safety issues, Graves rightly points out that if these belong to a potential-adversary foreign power, willful apathy stemming from UFO stigmas could be creating a considerable blind spot for national security.

“If this is an earthly threat here, then they’re massively taking advantage of our cultural biases. You know, honestly, it would be brilliant to do that,” conceded Graves. “We already know China has massive intelligence-gathering programs. They’re trying to gather as much data as possible. What if this is just a natural extension of that?”

I asked Graves what he hoped to see happen with all of the interest in UAP now, particularly by lawmakers and the Department of Defense.

“I think we’ve taken some good first steps with the new reporting system. I think this initial level has been successful, and now people can report this stuff or talk about it without getting ridiculed,” said Graves. “I don’t think there’s some massive conspiracy going on. I think it’s a lot of just looking the other way and dealing with threats that seem more important at the time. That’s how the military operates. It’s the closest alligator to the canoe that’s going to kill you. It’s not the one on the shore. But, at the same time, if we’ve got unknown objects operating near our borders, at some point we’ve got to figure out who or what that is.”

Graves says he’d like to see the DoD provide a plan or process to investigate UAP events. “They’ve had the option to investigate this stuff for a while and never did,” Graves hesitates. “Just because the Navy is collecting data now doesn’t really mean they’re going to do anything with it. It could sit in a spreadsheet somewhere, and nothing’s done.”

“The U.S. has a lot of systems to collect data. Like satellite data and stuff from various sensor networks. I highly doubt that the person in the Navy that’s currently working this has the clearance and access to go cross-department to get data. So we need someone responsible for this in a high-level senior position with the clearance to go across agencies to get necessary data. I also think whatever is done also needs to have civilian oversight.”

Graves told me he was glad to see the Navy and DoD come out and say the videos are authentic. However, that was a tiny step to solving the problem. “I think they need to also acknowledge there are vehicles in our airspace, and we don’t know what they are or where they come from,” said Graves.

Ironically, Graves’ last sentiments were similarly echoed to me by one of the highest-ranking former officials in the Department of Defense. A conversation that will be explored in the next chapter of The Debrief’s -Devices of Unknown Origin – Part III: “Just Tell The Truth About UFOs.”

In 1969, when the Condon Committee issued its final report condemning the subject of UFOs, Ray Mabus was getting ready to embark on a stint as a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy. Only 21-years-old at the time, it’s unlikely Mabus could have foreseen that 40 years later, he’d end up serving as the highest-ranking official in the world’s most powerful naval force.

Nevertheless, on January 17, 2017, when Mabus walked out of the Pentagon, he did so, having achieved something only four others in U.S. history had ever accomplished. He’d successfully served two consecutive presidential terms as Secretary of the Navy. The de facto ceiling for presidentially appointed and congressionally confirmed U.S. officials.

Now, having previously served as the Governor of Mississippi and later as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia under President Bill Clinton, it’s not as if Mabus lacked experience when he took over as the Navy’s chief executive in 2008.

Once billed as the “face of the New South” in a Mississippi political establishment that didn’t ratify the 13th Amendment and officially abolish slavery until 2013, perhaps Mabus was ideally suited to navigate the temperamental waters of D.C. politics.

Regardless, considering 6 different individuals have donned the title of Naval Secretary in the four years since his departure, Mabus’ 2,823 days in office certainly feels like a momentous feat.

In fact, only President Abraham Lincoln’s appointee, Gideon Welles, tops Mabus for the title of longest-serving Navy Secretary.

Lacking a splashy nickname like Welles’ “Father Neptune,” Mabus speaks with a kindhearted southern drawl that pours like ice-cold sweet tea on a Mississippi summer afternoon. With a distinguished head of silver and beaming smile, Mabus is the type of person that when he says, “it was good talking to you,” it feels like genuine appraisal and not a parting cliche.

On several occasions in early 2021, Mabus and I chatted about a multitude of things, including politics, the COVID-19 pandemic, the necessity for the Navy to move towards a more technologically versatile fleet, and the time he ran afoul the DoD’s bureaucratic legal eagles for the custom-made musket displayed in his former Pentagon office.

“My legal counsel came in and said, ‘You can’t have weapons in the Pentagon,” Mabus bemused. “I said, ‘Have you ever been to the Commandant of the Marines’ office?’ He could take over a small country with the amount of weaponry in there.”

Of course, given the branch he formally helmed has played vanguard for the Department of Defense’s sudden and unexpected interest in “unidentified aerial phenomena,” Mabus and I had to discuss UFOs, or in modern parlance, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAP).

“For the first two or three months after I left the job as Secretary, whenever I would see friends I hadn’t seen since I’d been in the administration, almost without exception, they would come up to me and say, ‘Tell me about the aliens. The UFOs. You know, don’t you,” chuckled Mabus.

If the U.S. government is squirreling away secret knowledge of visiting aliens they apparently forgot to tell Ray Mabus. That’s not to say, however, the former Secretary is dismissive of the subject or all the news coming out of the Pentagon nowadays.

With cordial frankness, Mabus told me discussions regarding military encounters with mysterious unexplained airborne phenomena, in fact, did come up during his time as Secretary of the Navy. “It was an area of curiosity for a lot of folks while I was there. So it’s interesting to see it getting lots more play now,” said Mabus.

News of UFOs being discussed within the most hallowed halls of the American military through 2008 to 2017 is likely to upset the fragile orbits of some who have suggested the wave of recent UFO news is merely the work of “Big Alien,” “Team Space Ghost,” or “mind warped” secret keepers.

Although it shouldn’t. In fact, it’s been reasonably well established that at least some within the defense community were talking about UFOs during Mabus’ tenure.

In 2008, then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid helped set up funding for a Defense Intelligence Agency effort dubbed the Advanced Aerial Weapon Systems Application Program or AAWSAP.

On paper, AAWSAP’s stated purpose was to “investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapon system applications, with future technology projections over the next 40 years, and to create a center of expertise for advanced aerospace technologies.”

Behind the scenes, the program is said to have been something a tad different.

The sole bidder and awardee of AAWSAP contract was Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). Formed in 2007, BAASS was a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace – an aerospace technology company founded and ran by billionaire Nevada entrepreneur Robert T. Bigelow.

Slender with a swept-back head full of pewter and pronounced mustache, Bigelow has had a long, well-established interest in the paranormal and UFOs.

Four years before founding Bigelow Aerospace, in 1995, Robert Bigelow established the National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS). The organization was self-styled as “a privately funded science institute engaged in research of aerial phenomena, animal mutilations, and other related anomalous phenomena.”

NIDS researched a montage of paranormal topics for nearly a decade, including cryptids, cattle mutilations, and UFOs. The most well-known of NIDS research centers around the group’s investigation of a Utah homestead then-owned by Bigelow, dubbed “Skinwalker Ranch.”

The roughly 512-acre ranch located southeast of Ballard, Utah, has a debatably long history of being a claimed rallying point for all things paranormal.

For at least the last 30 years, the site has purportedly played host to everything from sightings of werewolf-like creatures, UFOs, interdimensional portals, and even mysterious mutilations of livestock. In 2016, Bigelow sold Skinwalker Ranch for a reported $4.5 million to Adamantium Holdings, a shell corporation owned by Utah business mogul Brandon Fugal.

With executive chic, the bespeckled former Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award winner, Fugal, has become somewhat of a Bruce Wayne figure in the paranormal and UFO world after revealing himself to be the current owner of Skinwalker Ranch in March of 2020 to my fellow co-founder of The Debrief, MJ Banias.

Under Fugal’s ownership, Skinwalker Ranch has become the location and theme of a History Channel television series: The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.

In its second season, History looks to be trying to recapture the same lighting-in-a-bottle it stumbled on with its remarkably popular, Curse of Oak Island. Though, unlike the theme that has carried Oak Island for 7 years and counting, digging on Skinwalker Ranch is a big no-no. It is claimed that digging may disturb sinister incorporeal forces, resulting in grave consequences.

“When a lidar scan reveals a dark mass at Homestead Two, the team invites a Rabbi to perform an ancient ritual believed to reveal interdimensional portals, which leads to chilling results,” reads a preview for the show’s fourth episode of its second season.

Skinwalker Ranch also bears the distinction of being the claimed impetus behind the establishment of AAWSAP.

According to legend, DIA nuclear scientist, Dr. James Lacatski, visited the ranch with Bigelow’s blessing in 2007. Never explicitly naming Lacatski, a handful of former BAASS employees have said that a “DIA scientist” had an “experience” while visiting the homestead. In one example, former AAWSAP contractor and astrophysicist Dr. Eric Davis recounted for blogger Joe Murgia, aka “UFO Joe,” what others told him about the event: “In the living room of the former NIDS double-wide observation trailer/staff quarters. A 3D object appeared in mid-air in front of him and changed shape like a changing topological figure. It went from pretzel-shaped to Möbius strip-shaped. It was 3D and multi-colored. Then it disappeared.”

Lacatski, 69, is listed on government documents as the program manager for AAWSAP. However, so far, the scientist has never publicly discussed his involvement with AAWSAP, much less confirmed the experience at Skinwalker Ranch that’s been attributed to him.

Notwithstanding, former Senator Harry Reid has said that a “longtime member” of a “federal national-security agency” and “Ph.D.” came back from a visit to Skinwalker Ranch saying, “Something should be done about this. Somebody should study it.” So agreeing, Reid would elect the help of late-senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye to secure $22 million of seed funding for AAWSAP.

Since news of AAWSAP and another program- the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (ATTIP) (which we’ll discuss in a moment) – came to light in the New York Times on December 16, 2017, the Department of Defense had, for years, obstinately denied the programs had anything to do with UFOs or “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP).

Finally, in May 2021, after the DoD Inspector General’s Office announced they were launching an “evaluation into the DoD’s handling of UAP,” the Pentagon begrudgingly said AAWSAP or AATIP maybe had a little to do with UFOs. “Some of the contractors working in AATIP looked at reports of UAPs, [however] the examination of UAP observations was not the purpose of AATIP,” the Pentagon’s de facto UAP public affairs czar, Susan Gough, told me in an email.

The only evidence the government has offered to account for AAWSAP’s $22 million in funding is a list of 38 Defense Intelligence Research Documents (DIRDs). Of that list, at least one technical report is explicitly related to UFOs or UAP. The rest are an assortment of weird science topics such as traversable wormholes, stargates, and fusion energy.

In late 2019, I got my hands on a copy of a previously unknown “10 Month Report” BAASS had provided to the DIA. Examining the nearly 500-page document, I found it to be filled with strategic plans, project summaries, data tables, charts, descriptions of biological field effects, physical characteristics, methods of detection, theoretical capabilities, witness interviews, photographs, and case synopses- all explicitly focused on unexplained aerial phenomena or UFOs.

Moreover, during many interviews with numerous former BAASS employees, all independently but uniformly told me AAWSAP was nothing but a UFO program.

So, suppose indeed “some” contractors weren’t looking into UFOs, as the DoD has implied. Evidence of this non-UFO work remains curiously elusive.

In fact, one of AAWSAP’s former members hasn’t merely confirmed the program’s UFO focus. Instead, after leaving the DoD in 2017, former career counterintelligence official Luis Elizondo has launched a very public crusade to let the world know that “unidentified aerial phenomena” are very much real.

Luis Elizondo’s life story reads like militant Forrest Gump. Built like a wrestler, tattoos dotting both arms and a signature goatee, Elizondo, who prefers to go by “Lue,” says his family roots stem from a line of revolutionaries and freedom fighters.

During one of many phone conversations we had over the years, Elizondo recounted for me the time his grandfather caught his then-teenaged father making improvised explosives in the family kitchen of their home in Cuba. By 16 years old, Lue says his father was already an active member of the underground Cuban revolutionary movement.

“My grandfather confronted him and said, ‘Listen, these people aren’t worth your life or your freedom. If you continue to do this, you will no longer be part of this family, and we will never speak to you again,” Elizondo told me. Then, after a long pause, Elizondo said his father replied, “Dad, I’m doing what I think needs to be done.”

Rather than being exiled from the family, Elizondo’s grandfather told his son, “I’m so proud of you,” before divulging that he too had been a revolutionary during the early days of Cuba.

The elder Elizondo’s drive to fight for Cuba’s freedom would send him to Guatemala to train in the art of guerrilla warfare before being whisked away by the CIA in the early 1960s. Attached to the CIA-backed paramilitary group of Cuban exiles, Brigade 2506, Elizondo says his father would play a role in the attempted overthrow of Fidel Castro and failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.

During the Bay of Pigs, Elizondo said his dad was on the USS Houston transport vessel when Castro’s forces sank it on day one of the invasion, just south of Playa Larga, Cuba.

Making it to shore and changing into a set of clothes he found at a nearby farmhouse, Elizondo says his father would have escaped Castro’s military if it wasn’t for the fact he forgot to change his shoes. “My Dad looked real young and might have gotten away pretending to be a farm boy, but he was wearing his issued boots. It was his boots that gave him away,” Elizondo told me.

Elizondo’s father would end up spending a very rough couple of years in one of Castro’s infamous prisons. “He had a challenging time. He would tell me stories of how they were fed horse meat. One time while he was in prison, he had an infected tooth, so they decided to pull it without any type of novocaine. Can you imagine that? Having a tooth pulled with no pain meds,” said Elizondo somberly.

Once released from prison, the elder Elizondo would eventually make it to Miami, Florida, to restart his life in the United States as a Cuban exile.

Growing up amongst the Cuban exile community in South Florida, Elizondo describes his early childhood in happy terms. Raised by a passionately hard-working Cuban father and Jewish mother. Elizondo shared with me a photograph of him with an unruly swirl of dark hair atop his head and big gapped-tooth grin at around 9 years old.

Life, however, took a turn for the worse when Elizondo was in his teens and his parents divorced. “When my Mom and Dad got divorced, it was really pretty bad. We lost everything, and I remember the bank coming to repossess our house and my mom having to sell our clothes at a flea market,” said Elizondo. “My life changed in a pretty extreme manner, but it also made me who I am.”

Beating the odds for impoverished youths growing up in South Florida, Elizondo graduated high school and went on to attend the University of Miami. Elizondo largely credits the life lessons imparted on him by his father for his success of not becoming a statistic to the streets of Miami.

“My father told me, ‘Nobodies going to give you anything. But if you work hard enough, you’ll do very well,” Elizondo shared. “And don’t take anything more than what’s yours. Don’t take from anybody else. Work hard, and do it well. Even if it’s digging a ditch.”

Elizondo described himself as an “ok student” in college, enrolled pre-med with a focus on infectious diseases. “I had three majors at Miami. Microbiology, immunology, and parasitology – not’ parapsychology,” joked Elizondo. I asked Elizondo about his academic focus on infectious diseases, a seemingly odd mix for a man who would ultimately spend his career gathering secrets or catching spies in the Intelligence Community.

“I was always fascinated by the way nature works,” said Elizondo. “Nature is a riddle, and diseases are like warfare on the biological level. To me, that’s what microbiology is. It’s warfare inside the human body. That’s really what led me into the world of intelligence and whatnot. It wasn’t so much medicine. It was the idea that there was a struggle or conflict with nature inside our bodies that is constant and pervasive. I just found it interesting.”

Indeed, upon graduating with a degree in immunology and infectious diseases, rather than going on to medical school, Elizondo says he would make one of the most significant decisions of his life. He joined the Army.

In truth, Elizondo says his reasoning for joining the military was more practical than patriotic. At least initially. “I had a whole lot of debt after college, and the Army came in and said, ‘Look, if you join us, we’ll pay off all your student debt in three years,” Elizondo told me. “That’s like a small mortgage. It was a really great financial deal.”

Reasoning aside, Elizondo attributes his choice to join the military as one of the best decisions he’d make in his life. “It wasn’t easy by any stretch, but it was one of the greatest experiences of my life,” said Elizondo.

After working a few years in Army counterintelligence, Elizondo says it wouldn’t be long before he’d find himself being recruited to join some of the more enigmatic appendages of the U.S. Intelligence Community. “I was recruited into a special program where I wound up working for some specialized activities. I don’t want to get in trouble by saying much more than that, in case it’s still going on,” Elizondo hesitated.

According to friends, at least some of what Elizondo did post-Army and in the run-up to the September 11, 2001 attacks involved counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations in Latin America.

Post 9/11, Elizondo says he was thrust into the fight on terror, ending up in East Asia and at one point serving as an advisor to a small intelligence unit supporting General James Mattis and the Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) Task Force 58 in Afghanistan.

By early 2008, Elizondo finally came out of the field and settled on a cushy office job in the Information Sharing and Foreign Intelligence Relationships Office in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSD(I)). In June of that same year, Elizondo says an unexpected visit would be the catalyst for why the world would later come to know “Lue, the UFO guy.”

At his off-site office in Crystal City, Virginia, Elizondo says he was approached by two members of AAWSAP. From this, Elizondo would go through a series of conversations and vetting to gauge his interest in possibly joining the unconventional project. This would culminate in a meeting with the AAWAP’s program manager, James Lacatski.

“The guy running AAWSAP asked me, ‘What do you think about UFOs?’ Elizondo recounted. “I told him, ‘I don’t. I don’t think about UFOs. I don’t know if they’re real or not. I don’t think about them. I’m too busy trying to catch terrorists and bad guys.”

His UFO cynicism was evidently the response Lacatski was looking for.

Brought into AAWSAP to help with counterintelligence and security, Elizondo says early on he would find out about a sub-component focusing solely on military encounters with UFOs or UAP. This sub-portfolio being the previously mentioned Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (ATTIP).

In a June 2009, letter addressed to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn former Senate majority leader Harry Reid requested “special access program”(SAP) designation for AATIP, meaning the program would have official compartmentalized secret access. Had this request been granted, it’s very likely none of us would be talking about AAWSAP, AATIP, or the government’s interest in UFOs right now. However, Reid’s request was denied and here we are.

In 2018, redacted copies of Reid’s letter leaked into the public realm via KLAS Las Vegas reporters George Knapp and Matt Adams. Elizondo’s name was amongst the list of preliminary personnel proposed to have SAP access to AATIP.

By 2010, Elizondo and a handful of former program members told me that senior DIA leadership had become increasingly hostile toward the idea of having a program that was involved in “that crazy UFO topic again.” Facing opposition, it is said the decision was made to let Elizondo carry the program out of the DIA and from his position at OUSD(I).

Elizondo says once at the helm, he reduced efforts to just AATIP and focusing on military encounters with UAP rather than the medley of paranormal topics AAWSAP was reportedly examining.

“Limiting things to just AATIP wasn’t a decision that was made unilaterally by me. Many of us were part of the calculus in deciding to refocus efforts,” Elizondo told me.

“There was ample information, data, and evidence indicating continued incursions into controlled U.S. airspace, so we felt it was best to just focus on that,” Elizondo added. “Plus, AAWSAP was looking into a lot of stuff that goes ‘bump in the night,’ and that was always going to attract a lot of negative attention from the front office.”

Since details of AATIP’s existence began pouring out in 2017, AATIP’s post-2010 years have proved to be a point of controversy.

In 2012, funding for AATIP was exhausted. However, rather than packing up shop and closing the doors, Elizondo says he maintained efforts by “boot-strapping” the program and continuing to examine reports of UFOs or UAP.

Though these endeavors are not something that would ever appear on any DoD program element guide, it is still possible to glean some understanding of AATIP during the “Elizondo years.”

Officially, Elizondo was a Chief in the Information Sharing and Foreign Intelligence Office, and later in 2016, the Director of National Programs Special Management Staff. Quietly, Elizondo says he preserved AATIP in the form of a formal working group made up of trusted associates from within the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Through numerous background conversations with both past and present defense and intelligence officials, including some senior executives, I was told that Elizondo and a handful of others were surreptitiously examining reports of UAP that came their way through varying backchannels.

Purportedly, there was a small consistent cadre working with Elizondo on AATIP. However, other transient government officials could also be called on to offer expertise or insights whenever needed. Expertise in aerospace, electro- optical and radar engineering, along with officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), U.S. Strategic Command, Navy, Air Force, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and OUSD(I) are said to have offered varying degrees of support to AATIP.

In 2015, reports of the mysterious “jittery” objects being encountered by Navy Aviators off the Eastern United States (Detailed in Part II: Interlopers Over The Atlantic) made its way to AATIP after senior Navy leadership sent out a cry for help.

I was told not long after this, in 2016, a formal operations plan to address UAP was drafted and submitted through Alternative Compensatory Control Measure channels at the DoD. Two persons I spoke with hinted that a portion of the operations plan may have involved attempts to “coax” UAP into showing up, potentially involving the object’s propensity for showing interest in nuclear materials. Unfortunately, however, specific details of this plan were said to be classified, and no one was willing to share much more, outside of acknowledging it existed.

Additionally, in 2016, it is said that AATIP successfully commissioned at least one academic study by a major American university in effort to determine technical assets that could be used to better detect and monitor UAP activity. I wasn’t provided any specifics of the study, however, it was said to have been slightly shrouded in the guise of examining signatures of space and missile defense threats to the United States.

In several conversations, former senior Pentagon officials told me about numerous early 2017 briefings they had on UAP with Elizondo. At least some of these meetings were said to have included several of the F/A-18 pilots and E-2 Hawkeye radar operators from the 2004 Navy encounter with a “Tic Tac” shaped object off the southwest coast of California.

Former F/A-18 pilot and UAP eye-witness Alex Dietrich confirmed to me in a phone conversation that she had been one of the Navy pilots who had provided briefings regarding the 2004 “Nimitz encounters” to senior DoD officials and members of Congress.

In the early days of 2017, numerous officials told me that former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, Christopher Mellon, was instrumental in helping connect ATTIP and Elizondo with senior DoD officials and senior staffers on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees in Congress.

In several conversations, Mellon confirmed to me that he had indeed lended a significant helping hand in helping try to push the UAP topic to the highest levels of U.S. governance. Mellon has since been very vocal on his support for UAP action by America’s leadership, becoming arguably the biggest driving force behind why the topic seems to be being considered right now by U.S. officials.

Several former and current DoD officials also told me AATIP had indeed successfully collected much more imagery and data than has been made publicly available thus far. Reportedly, this includes videos of UAP flying in formation for extended periods, images captured at close proximity (by some accounts as close as 50 feet), along with other examples of high-fidelity imagery, possibly even showing objects moving underwater through airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR).

“I have a hard time, when I see the images, and I see the data, and I see the correlation between two or multiple systems, to figure out, to make sense of what I’m seeing,” one former senior executive defense official told me. “I saw a lot. I don’t feel comfortable saying more than that. But yeah, I saw a lot more than what’s been out there so far.”

The credentials of the individuals I’ve spoken with independently about AATIP or UAP are, by all accounts, beyond reproach. Regrettably, though, much of this information has been oral history and from persons who, for varying justifiable reasons, are unwilling to speak on the record.

Increasingly alarmed by UAP incursions, Elizondo says he made repeated attempts to push the issue to the highest levels of the DoD. When these attempts went nowhere, in early October 2017, Elizondo walked away from his employer of over 20 years. Opting instead to join, To The Stars Academy (TTSA), a then-recently formed UFO-centric private company established by former Blink 182 rocker Tom DeLonge.

Outwardly, it seems incredibly odd that a man who spent his entire adult life in the rigid confines of government service would abruptly join in on a UFO-themed organization being fronted by a juvenile rockstar who once released an album entitled “Enema of the State.”

In fairness, Elizondo wasn’t the only one to hitch their wagon to DeLonge’s UFO venture. Other impressively resumed members of TTSA included former program director and head of Lockheed-Martin’s Skunkworks, Steve Justice, and Christopher Mellon. All of whom have since left TTSA as of late 2020.

Yet, as odd as it may seem, Elizondo’s rarely discussed past and rebellious lineage as the grandson and son of rebel freedom fighters may offer some insight into why a man would leave a stable federal job with premo Pentagon parking to join a punk rocker and start talking about UFOs.

People can infer many things about Elizondo. Still, few who’ve actually spoken at length with him can fairly say Elizondo’s not passionate about his reasons for coming forward and discussing the UAP topic. His willingness to talk with anyone, from the random person with a YouTube podcast and 30 listeners to the highly polarizing Tucker Carlson, seems to stem from a genuine belief that the public deserves to know that UFOs or UAP are real.

For its part, after initially confirming Elizondo ran AATIP since spring of 2019, the DoD has been steadfast in claiming he had no “assigned responsibilities” in the program. In fairness, over the last 4 years, the DoD’s position on AATIP or UAP has been, at best, indecisive.

Source conversations, emails, and documents I’ve reviewed suggest the Pentagon has been playing a game of semantics over Elizondo’s role with AATIP. While saying he had no “assigned responsibilities” may indeed technically be true, a more accurate reflection of the situation would be addressing whether Elizondo had any “approved activities” that involved AATIP. Unfortunately, this is a question the DoD has thus far declined to answer.

Recently, it was announced that through his attorney, Daniel Sheehan, Elizondo had filed a formal complaint with the Inspector General’s Office against the DoD with claims of “malicious activities, coordinated disinformation, professional misconduct, whistleblower reprisal and explicit threats perpetrated by certain senior-level Pentagon officials.”

The Inspector General’s Office’s involvement, both in Elizondo’s complaint and their own self-initiated evaluation, could ultimately end up having one of the most significant impacts on the UAP topic in nearly half a century. However, known for working diligently, not quickly, any impact by the IG may not come until years down the road.

For now, the Pentagon’s denial of the central claims surrounding AAWSAP and AATIP and Elizondo’s role has proved to be an ideal avenue of attack for many critics. In many cases, these critics zeal appears less rooted in Elizondo and more on how anyone would dare speak about UFOs publicly or willing to call themselves amongst the ranks of “UFO enthusiasts” (See Part I: Mystery in the Caribbean).

There is, of course, an overlooked problem in attacking Elizondo’s credibility as a means for attacking the entire UFO discussion.

Whether Luis Elizondo is ultimately bound for sainthood or infamy is irrelevant. Likewise, whether he was the director, coordinator, or sovereign emperor of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, is essentially meaningless.

Instead, since coming forward 3 years ago, Elizondo’s core message has been that there are devices of apparent intelligent control and unknown origin flying in our skies with impunity.

What precisely these devices represent can be a matter of debate. Yet, according to past and current Senators, current and former directors of the CIA and National Intelligence, Deputy Secretaries of Defense, and former Presidents of the United States, these claims are indeed valid.

And when it comes to the former senior government officials who’ve come out saying there’s something to this whole UAP thing, former Secretary of Navy Ray Mabus says you can add his name to that ever-growing list.

Taken aback by his cheerful candor that UFOs had been a topic of conversation while he was Secretary of the Navy, I asked Mabus if sightings of UAP or unknown aerial objects was actually something occuring far more frequently than the public realizes.

“I would say, yes and no,” professed Mabus. “In fact there are more sightings or encounters than people realize. But they are ones that were easily explainable. For example, people might see a long flash or something and record it. Come to find out it was a missile launch or test in the area, that for whatever reason hadn’t been announced. Now, there’s a difference between that and the stuff that’s been released by the military lately.”

Mabus explained on occasion there were incidents involving highly trained military observers or sophisticated intelligence and surveillance technologies that were much harder to pin down. “Like these incidents with the U.S. Navy pilots. They are very familiar with everything going on in the area they’re operating in and are familiar with the technology. These were very hard to explain.”

Given that known events like the 2015 “Roosevelt Encounters” (See Part II: Interlopers Over the Atlantic) occurred while he was in command of the Navy, I asked Mabus could it be likely that some of these mysterious events involved top-secret U.S. technology. “A couple of things. Number one, no,” Mabus said with a sincere and hearty laugh. “Number two, do you really think we could keep stuff like that secret?”

The former Navy Secretary conceded he understood why some people might believe the military would test highly-classified technology on their own people.

“The military does not have a good record with those types of things. You know, they let service members be close to atomic tests to see what would happen. They tested psychedelic drugs on people without telling them back in, what was it, the late 40s, early 50s,” said Mabus. “That’s clearly not a good thing.”

In light of this past unscrupulousness, Mabus expressed it was a logical fallacy to assume events like “Operation Plumbob” or “MK Ultra” could be carried out in today’s U.S. government. To this point, since the early 1990s, a number of federal laws, oversight measures and formal governance structures have been implemented to prevent rogue, unlawful or immoral activity in even the most highly-classified programs.

Mabus’ sentiment was one repeated to me by numerous other U.S. defense and intelligence officials; including former Assistant to the Commander of NORAD and Executive Assistant to the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Brigadier General Bruce McClintock. “It is unlikely that the U.S. government would intentionally conduct tests against its own unwitting military assets,” McClintock told me in an interview late last year.

As Mabus also points out, in recent examples of when classified activities breach contemporary legal or moral lines, these ventures don’t remain secret for very long. With the CIA’s infamous “enhanced interrogation techniques,” lawmakers had been briefed on the program shortly after it had been approved by George W Bush’s White House in 2002. Details of the physical and psychological interrogation techniques being used would slowly begin leaking out to the public within the year.

The last use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the CIA occurred on November 8, 2007. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13491 making it unlawful for U.S. agencies to engage in interrogation practices viewed as torture, including the use of “waterboarding.”

Having been CEO for one of America’s military branches for almost 8 years – including periods when some of these UAP encounters were going on- Mabus expressed that it was nearly impossible these events were the results of some highly-secret U.S. technology.

“Somebody would have spilled the beans by now, and moreover, I think I would have known if somebody was trying to test some superduper top secret thing on our own folks,” said Mabus. “I don’t know a single senior person in the Navy, me or anybody in uniform for that matter, who would have said, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea.’”

Mabus told me he had been shown imagery that was captured during purported UAP encounters, including incidents that have since come to light, such as the 2004 Nimitz and 2015 Roosevelt encounters. Interestingly, even as the Secretary of the Navy, Mabus says he was never given any satisfactory answers about what it was pilots were encountering.

“I asked what was the explanation [for UAP]. Some people had hypotheses, like it was a glitch in the system or something that didn’t make any sense. And yeah, you know, there just was no rational explanation,” said Mabus. “I did ask a few questions, but then I never got much of an answer back. Nobody really had any answers to give. The military folks always seemed pretty dismissive.”

Many might wonder why the Secretary of the Navy wouldn’t have made a bigger deal about these mysterious encounters and demanded someone get to the bottom of it. “You know, I had enough coming in back then as it was. My bandwidth for pushing those sorts of questions was pretty limited,” sighed Mabus.

Mabus’ comments as to why he didn’t make a bigger deal out of UAP while he was in office, have been likewise expressed to me by other former senior defense leaders. It wasn’t as if principle leadership were given an adequate explanation or didn’t believe there was something truly odd about these reported events. Rather, there always was something, often multiple somethings, going on that felt like it represented more dire concerns for U.S. national security.

Whatever these mysterious UAP objects were, they didn’t seem to be posing any real danger or threat. In essence, the inexplicable nature of the events allowed them to easily be regulated to laughable realm of “UFOs,” saving time and energy on matters like China’s advances in the South China Sea, Russian expansion in Eastern Europe, Iran’s proxies in the Middle East, or North Korea threatening nuclear strikes on the continental United States.

“We had Syria launching chemical weapons against its own people. We had the Horn of Africa, absolutely on fire with Yemen and the Civil War proxy war with Iranians and the Saudis. And, by the way, no shit. We are on the brink of nuclear war with North Korea,” a former senior official in the Secretary of Defense’s office told me, explaining everything that was going on at the time when they received several briefings related to UAP. “I know that is a sad story. It’s not the right story. It’s not the right answer. I’m not proud of it. But it is reality.”

Ironically, at the same time Mabus was asking a few questions, to no avail, within AATIP, Elizondo and Co. were quietly trying to solve the UAP riddle. Yet, each were oblivious to the other’s interest or endeavors.

One thing that seemed fairly obvious from my conversations with Mabus, had the Navy Secretary known about it, he would have been supportive of AATIP’s work.

“It’s not a one off thing. Yeah it’s worth looking into,” declared Mabus. “I mean say it’s not aliens. Say it’s some other nation that is perfecting that technology or using some strange technology just off the U.S. coasts. Doubtful! But that is still something that would be good to know. Not just out of human curiosity, but also national security. It would be good to know if there’s something going on here. Plus, if something else is trying to contact us, it’s not like that would be a layup shot.”

Given that the DoD’s public messaging has been chaotic, and the pending Congressional report on UAP, I asked Mabus if he felt like something truly unknown would be difficult for the Pentagon to talk about with the American people.“You know, the DoD doesn’t say very often, ‘we don’t know,” Mabus laughed. “That’s a pretty stunning revelation right there.”

“So far they seem to be being pretty transparent about it by saying ‘we don’t know.’ But there shouldn’t be any issue with being transparent, releasing the stuff and saying, ‘we don’t know, but we’re looking into it.’ I know people don’t like that answer. That ‘we don’t know.’ But when it’s the truth, that’s what you need to say.”

“Admitting you don’t know is a pretty good place to start. Instead of saying we don’t know what this is and we’re not going to let you know either.”

Perhaps, Mabus’ lateral thinking on the subject of UAP or UFOs isn’t all that surprising.

In his final year in office, Mabus was labeled as a “controversial Secretary of the Navy” by the Navy Times. What Mabus had done during the preceding 7 years to draw such a title, was stand firm on pushing such apparently radical ideas that all military roles, including combat positions, should be opened up to qualified women. Racism, alcohol abuse, and sexual violence, must be eradicated from the ranks. And the Navy’s future fleet needed to be poised to operate on alternative clean energy and be less dependent on Middle Eastern Oil.

Half a decade later, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have been widely praised for pushing nearly the same principled agenda that once labeled Secretary Ray Mabus as “controversial.”

Speaking with NPR in 2015, about the strength of diversity and not becoming fixated on maintaining past status quos, with that same warm southern accent he shared with me during our conversations about UFOs, Mabus said, “If you have the same outlook, if you have the same mindset, you don’t get much innovation.”

The 4th and Final Chapter in Devices of Unknown Origin – Coming Soon

The guard gave the alarm and a military team arrived on the spot. They encircled the area and made a call to the radar, in order to see whether the object could be targeted. But however, for a mysterious reason, there was no electric power on the base and the radars could not be used.

Whereas the incident was reported later to the NATO headquarters in Brussels, ufologists were sent away and being told that it had actually been a mistake and that it all was an observation of the Moon shining above low clouds.

Some details:

In the night between the 30rd of June and the 1st OF July 1977, an American soldier named James Blake who was on duty near NATO's air base of Aviano, noticed at about 03:00am lights suspended at approximately 100 meters from the ground and over some hangars where aircraft were parked. These hangars are located in an area of the base called "Victor Alert," a zone of maximum security of the Aviano airfield. That night the airport was closed to the air traffic, as an aerial manifestation was under preparation for the 3rd of July; the radars consequently were not in function.

So when the sighting occurred, the radar operator immediately activated the systems which, according to an investigation by the civilian group CISU, intercepted the UFO which was hovering right over the Base, in contradiction with other accounts that said that there was a total power outage at the base at the time of the sighting and that radar never functioned.

The object had a disc shape and was topped by a dome. Its diameter was of approximately 50 meters and had colorful lights, that changed from white to red and then green, and the object emitted a buzzing sound.

Seemingly the object stayed hovering over the base for an entire hour, and at some point all the lights at the base went out. The phenomenon was observed from a consisting number of military that during the sighting remained at a safe distance from the zone illuminated by the unknown object.

CISU, a well-known Italian civilian UFO investigation group, said that the soldier's report was reliable, and that he forwarded the alert to the NATO's Operational Center in Brussels. Seemingly, he received no reply.

CISU stated that an important point is that some inhabitants of the City of Aviano have also seen the solid object over the military installations and for several day the event had become the talk of the town in Aviano. Then the military authorities provided their explanation. The phenomenon was attributed to a glare of the Moon on the clouds layer. Based on the meteorological data that have been supplied later by the Air Base staff, it was learned that:

A) The maximum temperature was of 26°C and the minimum was of 15°C.
B) There was moderate wind coming from the West.
C) There were few clouds in the sky.
D) The humidity was approximately of 75%.

From these data, it can be estimated that the minimal temperature was was too high in relation with the humidity, and thus the meteorological conditions necessary in order to create clouds of low altitude. Moreover, the time of the sighting implies that the Moon could not be visible over to the Military Base and was already too low on the horizon.

One year later, in January 1977, Colonel Jerry Rolwes of the US Army, who left the Army in 1993, has confirmed that in the Aviano base on the 1st of July 1977, alarm was given due to the presence of a UFO. According to Colonel Rolwes, a sargent had declared that the Object had a diameter of approximately 30 to 35 meters. In addition to these declarations, photographs were released by an aeronautics fan named Claudius Gallet, who said that he took them during an "open day" air show at the Aviano base in July 1977. He was taking pictures of the military airplane during the exhibitions and, apparently without wanting it, he accidentally caught a UFO in flight on the base. The photographs have been examined at some photographic laboratory and they are said to have shown no signs of tampering.

In June 2005, I received the following non-anonymous email report:

Subj: UFO over Aviano AFB Jul 1977
Date: June 28, 2005
From: [retained]@msn.com

Hello from Colorado,

Ref: Aviano 77

On June 30, 1977 I was assigned as the after hours Base Alert Photographer on Duty.

As I recall it, I was called out to the Base flight line at about 11:00 pm. I was told very little about what I would be photographing by the driver that picked me up. That was very unusual. I was taken to the security police guard house, close to the flight line, and was told that the Group Commander would be coming to pick me up and take me out to the sight. That was extremely unusual and in fact had never happened. Once inside the security Police guard house I noticed that three security police officers were very upset. One was crying frantically. The second was trying to calm her down. The third was staring into space like in a trance. Then, another security policeman came in and asked me what equipment and film I had with me. I told him I was prepared for taking black and white photos only. He told me that we needed to go and retrieve color film and a motion picture camera from the Base Photo Lab ASAP and return to the guard shack. We did so. By this time there were another seven or eight security police in the main area of the guard house. All were talking to each other about what they had seen. I overheard enough to know it was no light on the clouds. What I heard was similar to what was reported in the article on your web page. There are a couple of exceptions. I heard that the UFO made no sound at all. I also heard that the security police attempted to communicate with it. That they were within 15 feet of it. I can also tell you that it was a very clear night. No clouds in the sky at all. I was by now expecting to be taking pictures of a lifetime. Then, before they could get me out to the sight, the UFO took off. We were then told not to say anything to anyone about what had taken place. I had a very good friend that was assigned as the group commanders secretary. The next day I explained what had happened. She said that perhaps she could find out more about the incident when she went into work on Monday. She was able to report that there was not one mention of the incident on the police blotter. Very unusual in as much as the base commander and the group commander had been called out along with most of the security police on base. Another interesting thing happened after the incident. All those that had been to the sight that night were transferred back to the states within a few weeks. Normally it would take three months to get orders to leave. However, before they left everyone on base had heard about the UFO.

My conclusion is that there was a UFO that hovered a few feet off the ground just a few feet from the fence of our WASA area at Aviano AFB. It was there for what must have been as much as 90 minutes. This was no weather related phenomenon. It was a sighting by military professionals that witnessed some kind of machine that hovered just a few feet off the ground.

This event has been one of my favorite stories to tell. Perhaps your readers would be interested as well.

[Firstame Name], USAF, Ret
[eMail]@msn.com

Voir: 

• 1. Référence: LDLN 269-270 page 21

  2. Mufon UFO Journal - February 1996

Source: https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/aviano77.htm