Kind: captions
Language: en
how are these interacting with our
fighters if they are how are they
interacting with the weather and their
environment how are they interacting
with each other so can we look at these
and how they're acting perhaps as a
swarm
especially off the east coast where this
is happening all the time with multiple
objects
the following is a conversation with
lieutenant ryan graves former navy
fighter pilot including roles as a
combat lead landing signals officer and
rescue mission commander
he and people in this squadron detected
ufos on multiple occasions and he has
been one of the few people willing to
speak publicly about these experiences
and about the importance of
investigating these sightings especially
for national security reasons
ryan has a degree in mechanical and
aerospace engineering from wpi
and an interesting career roles in
advanced technology development
including multi-aging collaborative
autonomy machine learning assisted
air-to-air combat
manned and unmanned teaming technologies
and most recently development of
materials through quantum simulation
this is a lex friedman podcast to
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in the description and now dear friends
here's ryan
graves
what did you think of the new top gun
movie how accurate was it let's start
there i thought the flying was really
accurate i thought the the type of
flying they did and how they approached
the actual mission
um of course had a lot of liberties
but one thing that seems to be hard to
capture on these types of things are the
the chess game that's going on while
that type of flying is happening the
chess game between
like in a dogfight between the the the
pilots and the enemy or between the
different pilots i'll even speak to just
that particular mission they flew there
and
for that particular mission it's kind of
a chess game with yourself to to get
everything in place so
what kind of flight they flew is called
a high threat scenario which means they
uh have to ingress low due to uh the
surface-to-air threats that integrate
air defense systems that are nearby and
they have to ingress low and pop up like
we see in the movie
and in that particular movie that was a
pre-planned strike they knew exactly
where they're going but there's a
scenario where we have to operate in
that type of environment and we don't
know exactly where we're going to strike
or we're going to be adapting to
real-time targets and so in that
scenario you would have one of those
fighters down low like that operating as
a mission commander as a forward air
controller and he's out there calling
shots joining on those other players in
order to ensure they're pointed at the
right target so so that's a bit of the
chess game that he'll be playing
can you actually describe for people who
haven't seen the movie uh what the
mission actually is yeah what's involved
in the mission so
in this particular mission it's kind of
what we would call a pre-planned strike
so there's a known location that's in a
heavily defended area
and the air crew in this case i believe
it was four f-18s on the initial package
their job was to ingress very low down a
canyon to stay out of the radar window
of the surfs to air threats what does
ingress mean ingress means that they're
going to be pushing from a start
location towards the target or the
objective so there's an ingress portion
of the mission and an egress portion of
the mission oh
okay uh like the entrance and the exit
correct type of thing got it but it
changes our mindset tactically quite a
bit right because when we're entering
some place we have the option to enter
but when we go drop a bomb on location
we're exiting
we don't have that luxury we don't have
that option so it actually changes our
tactics and our aggression level
got it and so they were flying low to
the ground and then there's a
surface-to-air missiles
that
forced them to have to fly low is that a
realistic thing it is realistic so
driving those aircraft in the clutter uh
you know
all radar systems or most i should say
are essentially line of sight and so
they can be limited by the horizon or
any clutter out there and even a number
of radars if they are located up high
and looking down towards that aircraft
the clutter all the uh the objects such
as trees and canyons
can have effect on radar systems and so
it can be a type of camouflage
so that's the camouflage for the radar
but what about
the surface air missile
is that is that a legitimate way to
avoid missiles flies so low like fly i
guess below their uh
their level
as far as i know you know you can fly
under any radar right now
we don't have necessarily radars that
can look through anything so there is
always going to be the ability to mask
yourself
but with a larger number of assets and
distributed communication networks where
those radars are looking makes all the
difference and i said they are
ingressing pass in is and that's an
integrated air defense system and that
linking of
air defense systems is what makes it um
so hard so complicated is that the
sensors and the weapons are
disassociated from each other so that if
you took out the target that was
shooting at you it still has the ability
to um to intercept you from another
radar location
so it's distributed and it's stronger
that way
you mean the the surface-to-air missiles
if you like it's a
it's a distributed system and that if
you take out one
they're still able to
sort of integrate information about your
location and strike at you correct and
there's a lot of complication that can
go you know once we start thinking about
distributed systems like that and the
ability to self-heal and repair and
adapt to
losses
it's an interesting area are you
responsible for thinking about that when
you're flying an airplane to some degree
when we ingress to an area like that
we're presented with
information about targets air to air or
air to surface or surface to air i
should say
and we can essentially see where
essentially the danger zone if you will
is located
and so essentially we would stay out of
that and so having a full picture of
the environment is extremely important
because you know at the end of the day
if we go in that circle we can die
pretty quickly so
it's absolutely crucial so there's
regions that have higher and lower
danger
based on your understanding of the
actual whatever the the the the
surface-to-air missile systems are so
you can kind of know
that's interesting i wonder how
automated that could be too especially
when you don't know
it seems like in the movie they knew the
location of everything
um i imagine that's less known in most
cases
and also
a lot of those systems might be a little
bit more
ghetto if i can use that technical term
like um i've gotten uh ad hoc maybe is
the uh
i don't know but you know having uh just
recently visited ukraine and seeing a
lot of aspects of the way that war is
fought there's a lot of improvised type
of systems so you take height
uh high-tech like advanced technology
but the way you deploy it and the way
you organize it is very
improvised and ad hoc and is responding
to the uncertainty in the dynamic
environment and so
from an enemy perspective or whoever is
trying to deal with that kind of system
it's hard to figure it out because uh
it's like me
i played tennis for a long time
and it's always easier to play this is
true for all sports uh play tennis
against a good tennis player versus a
crappy tennis
because the crappy tennis player is full
of uncertainty
uh and that's really difficult to deal
with it seemed like in the movie the
systems were really well organized
uh and so you could plan and there's a
very nice ravine that went right down
the middle of them that's how movies
work isn't it yeah but no i i absolutely
agree so you know um what you say is is
a very good point and as you know if we
were to take a a
a chunk of airspace and break it up into
little bits you know there'd be places
that are better to fly or less less good
to fly
um and
you know we are seeing that now with
what they call manned unmanned teaming
uh we see tactical aircraft or you know
some type of aircraft or platform that's
being uh automated and it's not being on
made in traditional sense uh where
people think air crew are flying around
to conduct missions but it's very high
level uh objective orientated uh mission
planning that allows the air crew to act
more as a mission planner
mission commander versus having to just
pick the right assets or fly them around
and or manipulate them
um
somewhat physically
so actually going back to the chest
thing can you elaborate on what you mean
playing a game of chess with yourself
what's when you're flying that mission
what exactly do you mean by that well
there's a few people you're usually
fighting against in the air you know
there's the bad guys and then there's uh
physics and and mother nature right so
um
when we're down at about 100 feet um
it's a chess game to stay alive for the
pilot and it's a chess game for the
wizzo to
process the information he needs and
then communicate it to all those other
aircraft that were flying around to
ensure that they're putting their
weapons on the right target what's the
wizzo
wizzo is a weapons systems officer he's
a backseater who is not a pilot but
they're responsible for radar
manipulation and communications and uh
weapons appointments of certain natures
so the the chess game is against physics
against the enemy
uh
time
time what about your own
psychology fear
uncertainty no
no there's no time for that type of
self-reflection while we're flying
i want to get i want to get to that but
i i don't want to forget the point that
you made about increased randomness
being a tactical advantage you know as
we
as you mentioned you know you can
introduce autonomy in there and when you
when you bring autonomy in there and my
expectation would be as we bring
different uh abilities and machine
learning as we gather more data um we're
going to be able to bring the the
tactical environment around that jet the
war space that it goes into will almost
be at a stochastic level from the
enemy's perspective where it'll almost
seem like
every tactical environment they go in
will be random and yet very deadly
because
the system is providing a new tactical
solution essentially for that particular
scenario instead of just training to
particular tactics that have to be
repeatable and trainable and lethal
right but not necessarily the most
lethal because they have to be trainable
uh but if we can introduce ai into that
into and to have a level of randomness
or at least the appearance of randomness
due to the complexity
you know i would say like a stochastic
uh tactical advantage because even our
own blue fighters won't be able to
engage in that fight because it would it
would be unsafe essentially for anything
else uh and i think that's where we have
to drive to because otherwise it's
always this chicken and mouse cat game
about whose tactics and who knows what
but if knowledge is no longer a factor
um it's gonna make things a lot
different that's really interesting so
out of the many things
uh that are part of your expertise your
your journey you're also working on
autonomous and semi-autonomous systems
the use of ai and machine learning and
uh man-to-man teaming all that kind of
stuff we'll talk about it
but you're saying
sort of when people think about the use
of ai in war
in military systems they think about
like
computer vision for perception or
processing of sensor information in
order to extract from it actionable
knowledge kind of thing but you're
saying you could also use it to generate
randomness that's difficult
to work with in a like a game theoretic
way like it's difficult to respo for
human operators to respond to exactly
that's really interesting okay so
back back to tom cruise and top gun
what about the dog fighting uh what
aspects of that were accurate so dog
fighting is kind of uh an interesting
conversation because it's not the most
tactically relevant skill set nowadays
uh by traditional standards because the
the ranges with which we engage and
employ weapons are very
uh significant uh and so if we're in a
scenario we're in a dog fight like that
um
a lot of things have probably gone wrong
right and that's kind of how this
mission was set up right it was a you
know a no-win type scenario most likely
um and so for a dog fight the aircraft
size and the ranges and the turn
radiuses make it so it's not very
theatrical right the aircraft looks
small and while it's intense with the
systems i have and the sensors and what
i'm feeling and all that
if i you know we've done it and we've
done it right we take video of that and
it's just like a blue sky and you see a
little dot out there so not very
interesting and so
anytime it really looks interesting in
dogfight arena um that's most likely uh
fiction because we really only get close
for you know a millisecond as we're
zipping past each other at the merge
you're breaking my heart right i know
breaking my heart
no i understand you can go and have fun
but you know in a dog fight specifically
maybe that was more common in the
earlier wars of world war two and before
that where the is it due to the
sort of the range and the effectiveness
of the weapon systems involved exactly
and the accuracy of the targeting
systems at range but there's also a
train of thought um
that hasn't actually been tested out yet
which is with the advent of
advanced electronic warfare ew
and or
unmanned assets the battle space may get
so complex and missiles
may essentially just get
dropped out of the sky or wasted such
that you're going to be in close with
either ir missiles or guns uh if it's a
no kidding
um
you know must defend type scenario first
of all what's electronic warfare you
know it's basically trying to get
control of electromagnetic spectrum
for the interest of um whatever
operation is going on so in the tactical
environment a lot of that is trying to
deceive the radar or can we deceive the
missile or just you know stop their
guide and things of that nature
man it's a battle in the space of
information of digital information
yeah that well f-22 and f-35 right f-22
is a big expensive aircraft and it was
made to be a great fighter
but the f-35 is not as great of a
fighter but it's it's an electronic
warfare and mission commander platform
of the future
where information is what's going to win
the war instead of the best dog fighter
and so it's interesting dichotomy there
what's the best airplane ever made
fighter jet ever made i know the
aviators in the in the audience are
gonna hate my answer because they're
gonna want that sexy you know muscly
f-14 tomcat type fighter or or maybe
p-51 type aircraft but
the
f-35 is maybe not the best dog fighter
but it doesn't have to get in a dog
fight right it's like how you'd be the
best knife fighters not getting a knife
fight sometimes lockheed martin f-35
lightning ii
it looks pretty sexy there's two real
strengths you can have as a fighter you
can you can have the ability to kind of
out muscle your fighter uh your your
opponent and beat them on g's and power
and rate around on them and then there's
the other side of that which is uh you
can be overly maneuverable
uh you can bleed energy quickly and
that's what the f 3 f 18 was good at
because it had to be heavier to land on
the aircraft carrier we had to give it
extra bulk
but it also needed special mechanisms to
slow down enough to land on aircraft
carrier so it made it very maneuverable
and what that leads to a lot of times
the ability to get maybe the first shot
in a fight
which is very good but if you do make
that sharp turn you're going to bleed a
lot of energy away and be more
susceptible for follow-on shots if that
one's less susceptible and so there's
this kind of aggression non-aggression
game you can play depending on the type
of aircraft you're fighting where does
the f-35 land on that spectrum the f-35
lands somewhere behind the f-22s so
there'll probably be a row of f-22s or
f-18s and f-35 will be out back but
it'll be enabling a lot of the warfare
that's happening in front is it one of
the more expensive planes
because of all the stuff on it it
certainly is yeah
in the movie they have tom cruise flied
over mach 10. so maybe
can you say
what are the different speeds
accelerations feel like mach 1 2 3
or hypersonic have you ever flown
hypersonic no
um does it get how tough does it get
i'm just going to call out the the bs of
ejecting at mach 10 just for the record
because in the movie uh there's been i
think at least one ejection that was
super sonic uh and i'll just say you
know it was not pretty but he survived
um so there have to be some interesting
mechanisms to eject successfully at mach
10 but i'll digress
yeah
uh but anyway so what
um
what's interesting to say about the
experience of ma of the as you go up
does it get more and more difficult
in the end of the day crossing the sound
bear is much like crossing the speed
limit on the highway you don't really
notice anything
um
to cross that at least an f-18 because
we have a lot more weight than most
fighters is typically we'll do that in a
descent
and we'll do that a full afterburner
just dumping gas into the engine
and so that'll get us over the fastest i
think i've got about 1.28
but what's interesting people realize is
that if i take that throttle and i'm an
afterburner and i just bring it back and
just bring it back to mill which is full
power just not afterburner the
deacceleration is so strong due to the
air friction that it throw you forward
in your straps almost you know i would
say you know maybe like 70 of strong
almost as has trapping on the boat it's
pretty strong
so it's almost like a reverse car crash
just for the acceleration so the
acceleration you know is usually kind of
slow and you don't feel anything of
course when you're crossing through it
but the acceleration is pretty violent
the deceleration is violent huh okay
uh but is there
is there a fundamental difference
between like mach 1 and hypersonic mach
5 and so on does it require like super
special training
and is that something that's
used often in warfare is that not really
that no so hypersonic human flight in if
it exists it's not something that's
employed tactically
in um in any sense right now that i'm
aware of so
um you know i think of hypersonic um
technology i think of uh missiles and
weapon systems and delivery platform i
don't think of fighter aircraft
necessarily i can think of bomber or
reconnaissance aircraft perhaps
but those would be more efficient very
long long range i imagine acceleration
would be kind of gentle honestly
the thing you experience is the
acceleration not the actual speed
um there's been just a small tangent a
lot of discussion about hypersonic
nuclear weapons like missiles from you
know russia
uh bragging about that is this something
that's a significant concern or is it
just a way to flex about different kinds
of weapon systems
hypersonics i do think pose uh a
challenge for our detection systems
because there are
um
you know there are design considerations
in these sensor systems as always right
and when you build them and the
technology progresses to a point where
maybe it's not feasible to use that
technology you know there's a problem
but with the
you know the all domain and kind of
cross domain data linking capabilities
we have um
it's less of you know
it's a more of an integrated picture
i'll say um and so the hypersonics
are really
what it is is uh how fast can we detect
and destroy problem you're just
shortening the time available to do that
we call something like that the kill
chain right it's it's from
um locating a target and identifying it
and
you know essentially authorizing its
destruction by whatever means uh
employing and then actually following up
to ensure that you did what you said you
were going to do in some sense right
does it need another re-attack something
of that nature and so
there's an old dog fighting framework
you could call it it's called the ooda
loop that kind of made its way in the
engineering business now but the old
observe orientated side act was
initially a a fighter mechanism in order
to get inside that kill chain of your
opponent and break it up so that he
can't
uh process his kill chain on you and so
hypersonic's a way of shortening those
those windows of opportunity to to
react to that
i wonder what do like how much do you
have to shorten it in order for
the defense systems not to work anymore
it seems like uh
it's very you know i
i'm both often horrified by the thought
of nuclear war
but at the same time
wonder
what that looks like
when i i dream of extreme competence in
defense systems i imagine that not a
single nuclear weapon can reach the
united states by missile
with the defense system
defense systems but then again i also
understand that these are extremely
complicated systems the amount of
integration required and because you're
not using them
i mean this is exactly
there could be you know there's like an
intern somewhere
that like forgot to update the code the
fortran code that like is going to be
make the difference because you don't
have the opportunity to really
thoroughly test
um which is really scary of course the
systems are probably incredible if they
could be tested but because they can't
be really thoroughly tested in actual
um
in an actual attack i wonder
i mean i guess one assumption there
would be that these hypersonic missiles
would only be launched and the case
would attack
um it'd be interesting if there were
other hypersonic objects that we could
use to flex those systems
another thing that actually happened i
just have a million questions i want to
ask you it's fascinating to me uh is
there's a bird strike on the plane does
that happen often yeah it's a series
they damaged the the engine and they
made it seem like it's a serious exactly
a serious issue i've hit birds um i've i
know someone that took a turkey vulture
to the face
through the cockpit right shattered the
cockpit knocked him out
um i think the
it actually i don't know personally
about the story i know from uh the
command i was at and uh i believe the
backseater had to punch out
uh and punch them both out because he
was unconscious you know in the front
seat from the bird
um it can kill you from hitting you it's
you know it's like a bowling ball going
250 miles an hour
it can take out an engine uh
very easily uh
every airport i've flown at in the navy
i've had to check the the bird condition
if you will to see how many birds i've
we've had to cancel flights because of
because there's too many of them around
the airport some airports even have bird
radars with no tear ports there are
systems that monitor the bird condition
there is yeah there's actual radar
systems and you can go in the
certain bases you have to call up and
they'll tell you what it is for the day
or for that hour and other ones having
like their their weather report that
goes out with the radio
what are some technological solutions to
this or is this just
uh
because it's a low probability event
there's no real solution for it i would
say it's not a little probably develop
event i mean this is happening a lot i
mean although the hits themselves aren't
necessarily that common or i'll say a
catastrophic hit either a near miss or a
hit or the pilot having to actively
maneuver to avoid it is pretty common
and in fact it seems stressful it is
it's so common in fact that we know that
you never want to try to go over or you
never want to go under a bird if you see
it in front of you you always want to
try to go over it because what they'll
do immediately if they see you is and
you startle vegetables they'll bring
their wings in and just drop straight
down to try to get out of the path it's
interesting i didn't know they did that
but so if you immediately if you try to
go under them they're going to be
dropping into you so you typically want
to try to go above them is this
something you can train for or no um
is this one of those things you have to
really experience it's a skill set that
um
you somewhat trained for
in the duties of being a fighter pilot
in a sense right being able to react to
your environment very quickly and make
make decisions quickly so is that one of
the more absurd things challenges you
have to deal with in flying is there
other things sort of maybe weather
conditions
like harsh weather conditions is there
something that we maybe don't often
think about in terms of
the challenges of flying birds in a way
aren't a ridiculous threat for us it's
it's
a safety threat that
you know anything physical in the air is
something that we really have to be
careful about whether we're flying
formation off of the aircraft right next
to us or whether
it's a turkey vulture at two thousand
feet or a flock of five thousand birds
like at the runway we have to wave off
you know and
although they're low probability a lot
of bases will have like actual
environmental protection agency
employees that are responsible for
safely removing migratory birds or
different animals
um that may be in the runways or flying
about
wow i didn't know what a turkey vulture
is and it really does look like a mix
between a vulture and a turkey
and look kind of dumb no offense to
turkey vultures um
in that movie who was the enemy nation
was it uh i mean i think i guess they
were implying it's iran
or or is it russia i didn't think they
were implying any particular nation
state frankly i think they did a
somewhat decent job of having some
ambiguous fifth generation fighters
um
the location and and the stockpile like
i i get like how the story kind of
insinuates certain things but they seem
to a good job of not having anything
directly pointing to another nation
which i thought was you know the good
move i i enjoy these type of movies as
an aviator and
you know as an american right because
it's a feel-good movie but um you know
we we shouldn't be celebrating going to
war with any particular country you know
china russia whoever may have these
weapons it's it's fun to watch but it
would be an incredibly serious event to
be employing these weapons
yeah we'll talk about
war in general because yeah it's the the
movie is kind of celebrating
the the the human side of things and
also the incredible technology involved
but there's also the cost of
of war and the seriousness of war and
the suffering involved with war
not just in the fighting but in the
death of civilians and all those kinds
of things
um
well you were a navy pilot let's let's
talk a little bit more uh seriously
about this and you were twice deployed
in the middle east flying the fa-18f
super hornet
can you briefly tell the story of your
career as a navy pilot sure
so i joined the navy in 2009 right after
college i went to officer
essentially officer boot camp officer
kinder school
i applied as a pilot and i got into the
pilot that was the advantage of going
that way is that i essentially choose
what i wanted and if i got in great if
not i didn't get stuck doing something
else
so you knew you wanted to be a pilot i
did
i joined i went through my initial
training i went through primary flight
training that all aviators go through
and i did well enough that
you know one of the first lessons they
teach in the navy is that um you know
you can have a great career in the navy
and you can you know see the world and
do what you want but at the end of the
day it's all about the needs of the navy
and what they need so you know they may
not have the platform you like or you
know you may not necessarily get to
choose your own own adventure here but
uh i was lucky enough that there was one
jet slot in my class and i was uh lucky
enough fortunate enough to get it so it
was a jet slot so well yeah what that
means is that i was assigned actually a
tail hook at that point which meant i
would go train to fly aircraft and land
on aircraft carriers
um and there's essentially three
aircraft that do that at the time is f18
and the um
e2
and the c2
c2 is kind of like the male truck for
the boat e2 is the one with the big
radar dish on top
and then there's all the f-18s so e2 is
calms
c2 male 2
yeah what's that c2
they're the ones that bring supplies to
the ship via air and people sorry if i
missed it is it a plane is it a
helicopter it's a plane okay
all right and the f-18 is a fighter jet
correct okay so i selected tail hook
which meant i could get one of those
other ones but eighty percent of them
were so are jets so i was in a good spot
at that point and that's when i went to
murder mississippi to fly my first jet
which was the t-45 gauze hawk cool so
what kind of plane is that is that is
that that's what you were doing your
training on
that's the jet aircraft you get in
before you actually go to the f-18
it is a carrier capable so go to the
boat for the first time in it during the
day
drop uh fake bombs do dog fighting
um
low levels formation flying day and
night
well that's a pretty plain
yeah yeah and it looks like a cone so
that no one hits it
okay so it's usually not used for
fighting it's just for training it's
used for training how to fight got it so
what was that like was that the first
time you were sort of really getting
into it yeah that was really interesting
because before that it was a 600
horsepower prop plane and going from
that to the t45 is one of like the
biggest jumps in power and like
navy you know machine operation how much
horsepower does the 245 have
approximately
like 15 000 or so so it's a huge jump
from 600 you said horsepower about yeah
so it's a big big leap
but it's a jet you know so it performs
differently it's faster and right and
what that means not just because it's
faster your whole mind needs to be
faster everything happens faster in the
air now right those calms happen faster
um your landing gear has to come up
faster everything just happens faster in
a jet and so it's a big jump uh and i
never forget going on my first flight
in that aircraft
it was a formation flight for someone
else and i was just in the back watching
and there was an instructor in the
flight and so what that means is
instructors in a single aircraft and
then there's three or four other
aircraft and they're learning how to do
joins and they're learning how to fly in
formation and as a new student in the
back it's amazing right because you know
photo op time and all this like i'm
seeing aircraft up close for the first
time it's awesome
um
and on the way back um
we couldn't get our landing gear down uh
ironically
so
it you know to make a long story short
because it's overall not that exciting
uh we couldn't get the gear down we
actually went to go do a controlled
ejection uh to the target area that
where that is about 15 20 miles to the
north of the base did you wait did you
just say that's not that exciting
well
because that to me is pretty exciting so
that i mean how first of all
i mean uh i mean that must be terrifying
like uh early on in your careers i
haven't haven't seen those things
um
that yeah like how often does that kind
of thing happen
decent more than you would think more
than you would think there was no
significant panic this is like
misunderstood this is what has to be
done in this case i think i was probably
just too dumb to realize the
significance of it because as a new
student you know not really appreciating
you know just what is ahead of me if we
are rejecting um
but at the time it was more it was just
like wrote right because i was back
there and then i went from a observer
mode to a
i'm going to provide you the help that i
can provide you as a member of this crew
you know mode and so it was less about
i'm you know on this 20-mile trip and
thinking about my um how vulnerable i am
you know we're going through checklists
we're talking to people we're getting
ready so
no it wasn't it wasn't fearful and the
whole time we were doing one of these to
try to get the uh the gear down so we're
unloading the jet and then loading it
back to try to get the gear out
with the stick and um
and it came down it came down halfway um
there just on its own so we came back
around and we did like a safety trap in
case there was a problem with the gear
and that was my first flight you know uh
a little bit of serendipity but i'm
gonna fast forward a bit and i went back
to the squadron's instructor about five
or six years later and i was an aviation
safety officer at this point which meant
i was responsible for investigating
mishaps
and
a a student went in and he he went in
the back seat of a form flight
just like the one i went on
and he went out and he ended up
projecting on that flight exact same
type of flight they went out and they
had a runaway trim scenario and it
caused the aircraft essentially just
inverted itself almost 180 degrees
uh at about 600 feet over the ground and
they punched out just slightly outside
the ejection window at about 300 400
feet or so but they were completely fine
um
so you know and then about
two months later we had another ejection
about three months after that we had
another rejection so
um unfortunately you know it can it can
be more common that people think what
does it feel like to get ejected
thankfully i don't know i could describe
it to you i can tell you what it's like
from what i've heard but i truly think
it's one of those things that you just
don't understand until it happens
uh it's like instantaneous about 250 g's
which is only possible because of
inertia in our blood
right so you can actually get like 250
300 g's for like a few milliseconds and
then it backs off to like 40 or 50 g's
to get you away from the vehicle itself
and so
um you know you may lose consciousness
um if you
do you know who knows where you wake up
um you know you could be in a tree you
could still be falling uh you could be
in the water so the physics of that is
fascinating how do you eject safely
do you know the story about how that was
tested at all i don't know the full
story but uh there was i'm guessing
nobody knows the full story there's
probably a lot of shady stuff going on
but anyway uh you mean like in the early
early days or they suck a flight dock up
to a rocket sled and just see how much
their body could take it
and he turned a lot of his body into in
the mush in the in the process of
getting that science done but he saved a
lot of life
people use it used to be tougher back in
the day
that's how science used to be done
um so how did your training continue so
how did take me and take me farther
through your career
uh as you work towards graduating
towards the f-18s so in vt9 where i was
a student
there's two phases there's an
intermediate and advanced
intermediate is getting very comfortable
with the aircraft and at that point you
truly hear all right you're going jets
now or you're gonna go one of the other
aircraft that land on the aircraft
carrier
i was told i was going to you know jets
at that point and then we go into
same squadron same aircraft same
instructors but it's called advanced now
and now we're
learning how to dog fight for the first
time we're
doing what we call tactical formation
which is uh just like aggressive
position keeping
um we are doing um
dog fighting and low levels and all
sorts of great stuff so it's really that
first introduction to that tactical
environment and putting really putting
g's on the jet on your body and
maneuvering is there like tactical
formation is collaborating with other
fighter jets a part of that it is so
flying in a that's what you mean by
formation so literally having an
awareness all right is this done for you
or are you as a human supposed to
understand
like where you are in the formation how
to maintain formation all that kind of
stuff yeah is it done autonomously or
manually there's a great autonomy point
on the end of this i've thought about so
but what we do it's all manual so i'm
looking at his wing
and i'm looking at um different visual
checkpoints that form like a triangle
right like an equal out triangle
essentially and then as that triangle
you know is no longer equal i can tell
my relative position against that
aircraft right that's really cool uh and
so that's what i'm staring at first
sometimes hours on end you know several
feet away doing with these if i'm in the
weather that's all it is
so you get it's almost like is it
peripheral vision or is it no we're
staring directly at it the peripheral is
coming on my on my um that's interesting
stuff right my sensors and my
instruments and so here's my gyroscope
at that point right while you're flying
not looking straight correct i'm fly
like this for hours it can hurt your
neck we don't like doing this as much
and i don't think it's just me right
it's a weird thing where when you're
like this it's actually harder to fly
formation slightly than here because
being in line of your hand movements and
of the aircraft
somehow has an effect on our ability to
be more precise and comfortable it's
strange
uh yeah so but so the there's a symmetry
to the formation usually so one of the
people on the other side really don't
like being on that side
is it is it does it who gets like the
short straw how do you decide which side
of the formation you are it's a good
question too because there's there's
kind of rank in some sense so if it's a
four-person formation right you have the
division lead who's qualified to lead a
whole division but maybe the other ones
aren't and he has a dash too
and that's his wingman essentially and
then in a division there's two other
aircraft and then you have another
senior flight leader that's the dash
three position
and then you have dash four the last one
and if you are all lined up on one side
like fingertip one two three four that
dash four guy is going to be at the end
of that whip so if you're flying
formation each one's making you know
movements relative to the lead dash four
is kind of you know at the end of that
error you know and so his movements are
kind of like a whip it's very difficult
to fly in that position and close can
you elaborate is it because of the air
the aerodynamics what's the whip if this
is the flight lead and this is dash two
you know flightly is rock steady and
just doing his thing yeah flight two is
going to be working that triangle moving
a little bit right and he has this small
air bubble that he's doing his best to
stay and then but dash three is flying
off dash too and so his air bubble is
dash two's plus his own
and that's
more and more stressful as you get
further yeah
okay um what's the experience of that
staring for long periods of time
and trying to maintain formation
how stressful is that because like
you know we're doing that when we drive
staying in lane
and that becomes
after you get pretty good at it it
becomes somewhat it's still stressful
um
which actually surprisingly stressful
when you look at like lane keeping
systems they actually relieve that
stress somehow and it actually creates a
much more
pleasant experience while you're still
able to maintain situational awareness
and like
stay awake which is really interesting
like i don't think people realize how
stressful it is to lane keep
when they drive so this is even more
stressful so are you
do you do you think about that or is
this um yeah i guess how stressful is it
from a psychology perspective it's very
stressful uh when
so i taught students how to do this as
well and so at our feet we have two
writers and if i'm flying off a flight
lead over here what you'll find a lot of
times is you'll be flying or you like if
i'm the structure and the students
flying i'll start to notice that he's
having a harder and harder time keeping
position yeah and what i'll notice
typically is he's locked out his leg
they'll lock out the leg that's closest
to the aircraft they're flying against
and push on the rudder subconsciously
because their whole body's trying to get
away from the aircraft because they're
so uncomfortable getting close to it
and so i'll tell them i can i can fix
their form with just a couple words
they'll say wiggle your toes
and they'll wiggle their toes and
they'll reel out and they'll loosen all
the muscles in their legs
they've been locked up and their
formation flying will get a lot better
uh and so you know there's a lot of
stress associated with that there's some
interesting
psychological or
visual
issues such as um
vertigo as you're flying so if you're
flying with him and then you fly right
into a cloud right that's when it's very
stressful because you have to be very
close in order to maintain visual you
might be on thunderstorm right
and so you have to be very tight you
might start raining
and then he's turning but you might not
even know that
you might not even be able to see that
turn and so all of a sudden you might
look while you're in a turn thinking you
were straight level and you look
just maybe back at your instruments very
quick and you realize you're like in a
30 degree turn
and your whole concept of where you are
in the world
starts getting very confused and you
immediately get this this sense of
it it's weird like i look at the hud and
it it feels all my sensor telling me
it's spinning but it's not you know and
so i have to trust my instruments even
though it feels like it's spinning and
the same thing can happen
when you're flying formation off of
someone and it it can be very um
very dangerous and um disorientating but
the point is to
try to regain
awareness by trusting the instruments
like
like distrust all your human senses and
just use the instruments to rebuild
situational awareness not in this
particular case because our situational
awareness is based it's predicated off
of our flight lead so in a sense i'm
just trusting his movements and so he's
my gyroscope but you're absolutely right
if i was by myself i would trust my
instruments but i can't just stop flying
form and trust my instruments because
now i'm going to hit him oh yeah you
have to pay attention so he's my
reference so the instruments are not
helping you significantly with his
positioning not it's all completely
manual
so i is there a future where some of
that is autonomous yeah and i've thought
about automating that flight um regime
but when i started thinking about it
i you know realized that all the
formation keeping that we do
uh is designed to enhance the
aviator's
ability to maintain sight right so we
fly very tight formation so that we can
go in weather and to reduce
groups of traffic coming into the boat
we fly
in one particular position so that all
of all of the flight crew can look down
the line and see the flight lead so
everything is based
everything has to do with
the two air crew visually maintaining
sight of each other and defending each
other right
in a combat spread i might be looking i
may be three miles away from him flying
formation directly beam and looking
around to make sure nothing's there so
as i'm looking into automating this
process i thought
well you know
sure it's easy to get a bunch of
aircraft to fly in formation off each
other right it's it's trivial but why
you know what is the best formation why
are they doing that and that opened up a
much more interesting regime of
operations and flight mechanics and
that's when we get back to that kind of
stochastic mindset where we can bring in
aircraft close to do some type of normal
flying or reduce congestion around
airports but when we consider flying in
a formation and tactical environment we
can be much more effective with
non-traditional formation keeping or
perhaps no formation keeping perhaps so
autonomy used for formation keeping not
for convenience but for the introduction
of randomness that's hard too real-time
mission planner yeah
and then that's where you also have some
human
modifications so it's like
man unmanned teaming enters that picture
so you use some of the
human intuition and adjustment
of this formation the formation itself
has some uncertainty it's such an
interesting dance i think that is
the most
fascinating
application of artificial intelligence
is when it's human ai collaboration that
that semi-autonomous dance that you see
in these semi-autonomous vehicle systems
in terms of cars being driving but also
in the
safety critical situation of a airplane
of a fighter jet especially when you're
flying fast it's
i mean
in a split second you have to make all
these kinds of decisions and
it feels like an ai system can do
as much harm as it can help and so to
get that right
is a really fascinating challenge one of
the challenges too isn't just the the
algorithms of the autonomy itself but
how it senses the environment
that of course is going to what be what
all these decisions are based off of and
that's a challenge in this type of
environment well i gotta ask so uh f18
what's it like to fly a fighter jet as
best i mean what to you is
beautiful powerful
what do you love about the experience of
flying
for me you know and i think i'm an
outlier a bit it wasn't necessarily the
flying itself right it wasn't
necessarily the the soaring over the
clouds
and you know looking down at the earth
from upside down you know i i came to
love that and but it wasn't necessarily
the passion that drove me there i just
had no exposure to that the only exp the
exposure i had was
was reading and going in the woods and
and science fiction and and all that and
so you know what seemed to kind of drive
me towards that was just
a desire to really be operating as close
to what i thought was the edge of
technology or science and that's the
path that i chose to try to get close to
that i thought that being in a in a
fighter jet
uh and you know all the tools and the
technology and the
knowledge and the challenges and the you
know failures and victories that would
come with that just seemed like
something that
i wanted to be a part of uh and it
wasn't necessarily about the flying but
it was about the challenge and
like i said as a person from a small
town you know small high school
being able to get my hands you know or
even just near something of such
technological significance was kind of
empowering for me and that's kind of
what bore the love of flight from there
you know becoming you know having some
level of mastery in that aircraft it
really feels like an extension of your
body and once i got there then then the
kind of the level flying kind of
followed
so you sort of one is the man mastery
over the machine and second is the
machine is like the greatest thing that
humans have ever created arguably the
the like things that lockheed martin and
others have built
i mean the engineering in that yeah it's
um
however you feel about war
which is one of the sad things about
human civilization is
um
war inspires the engineering of tools
that are
incredible
and it's like
maybe without war if we look at human
history we would not build some of the
incredible things we built so in order
to
win wars to stop wars we build these
incredible systems
that perhaps propagate war
and that's a that's another discussion
i'll ask you about but this
do you this is like um
this is a chance to experience the
greatest engineering humans have ever
been able to do
like similar i suppose that astronauts
feel like when they're flying i wanted
to be an astronaut i wanted to take that
route
uh i was gonna apply to test pilot
school
um
it just didn't work out for me uh i
ended up having a broken foot during my
window but long story short i ended up
after uh my time in my fleet squadron
and we can get back to the rest of the
timeline if you want but
i went to be an instructor
pilot
um instead right and then you know i i
was talking about this with a squadron
mate earlier today about how you know i
certainly wouldn't be talking with lex
today if i ended up going to test pilot
school you know
i never would have i never would have
had the
i wouldn't
maybe recklessness i don't know but the
the willingness to have a conversation
about uap
while i was you know i that led me to
the decision to get out once i went
there and
it it kind of enabled me to talk about
uap more publicly
and if i stayed in the navy then i don't
think that would have happened i
wouldn't have been able to
if i went that route
well as a small tangent
do you hope to travel to mars one day do
you think you'll step foot on mars one
day
if you ask me that five years ago i
would have said
yes i want to in fact i would like to
die on myers
um
now today now i have some hesitations
and i have some hesitations because
i'm hopeful and optimistic and i think
that you know i think that we are truly
like on the brink of a very wide
technological revolution that's going to
kind of move us how we used to move
information and data
in in this last century we're going to
be manipulating and managing matter in
that next century and so i think that i
think our reach as human as humans are
going to get a lot wider a lot faster
than people may realize or at least
wait are you getting like super
ambitious beyond mars is that what
you're saying well i mean
like mars seems kind of boring i want to
go beyond that is that we
do do you mean the reach of humanity
across all kinds of technologies or do
you mean literally across space across
space you know so you know we're going
to be i think that as artificial
intelligence and machine learning starts
broaching further into the topic of
science or the area of science and we
start working through new physics we
start working through or i should say
pass the einsteinian frameworks
as we kind of get a better idea of what
space time is or isn't
we may have we may find you know answers
that we didn't know that we were looking
for and we may have more opportunity and
i'm not saying this is something i'm you
know betting the farm on of course but
um maybe maybe that's a road i want to
explore on earth instead of uh on mars
maybe there's technology that can be
brought to bear with new science and
harder engineering that is a road that
doesn't go past mars to get outside the
solar system
so there are different ways to explore
the universe
than the the traditional rocket systems
uh if we can continue sort of
your journey um
you said that that you were
attracted to the
the incredibly advanced technologies of
the f-20 uh of the f-18s and just the
the fighter jets in general
um
let me ask another question which seems
incredibly difficult to do
which is landing on a carrier or taking
off from a carrier and landing on a
carrier so
what's that like what are the challenges
of that taking off is pretty easy it's
procedurally
somewhat complex where there's a lot of
moving parts almost like a clock you
know you're almost in a pocket watch
some sense and you're a part of the
machinery and so long as you press the
right buttons and do the right things
and you're shooting off the front so
there's like a checklist to fall and
there's several people involved in that
checklist and you just got to follow the
checklist correctly essentially yep lots
of ways to screw it up but you'll know
how to screw it up
but landing on the back of the boat is a
whole different animal
there's a lot more variables um there's
essentially one or two people
responsible for the success of that
the landing signal officer who actually
represents a team of specially trained
aviators who are responsible for helping
that aviator land on the boat
and uh the pilot himself
and
it it is a hard task to actually fly
precisely enough to be good at it so to
fly quote unquote the perfect pass you
essentially have to fly your head
through a one foot by one foot box
that's essentially the target you're
shooting for
um plus or minus probably about five
knots on air speed although we don't
really judge it by air speed it's
something called angle of attack
but generally you know pretty tight
parameters there
um and you can do everything perfect and
still fail right so when we go to
touchdown we immediately bring the power
up and we rotate as if we were doing uh
as if we were bouncing off the deck and
if we catch it then we slow down
and then someone tells us to bring the
power back which we do we don't do it on
our own
because it's such a violent experience
you can think you're trapped or not or
something breaks and you you bring your
throttle back that's a very serious
thing it happened the best of us you
know i'll admit i've done it once when i
first got to the squadron um
it's called ease guns land
uh and so you know i came in the boat
and i brought the power i cracked the
power back a little bit before i've been
told to or that my aircraft had finished
settling in and that was a big faux pas
right so especially as a new guy so
um it's it's a very serious business
there's a lot of eyes on you and there's
a lot of ways to screw it up but the
physical you know rush of like having a
great pass and then like there's just
the
like the crash of into the boat and all
that the physical sensation from it you
know when everything's going great you
know it's top of the world it's a great
feeling
how much of it is feel how much of it is
um instruments how much is other people
just doing the work for you catching you
as long as you do everything right
there's a few systems we use one is
called the ball and that ball is
external to our aircraft and it's
b-a-l-l correct well
it's a it's a i floss landing system
which stands for something very long
convoluted but essentially it's a mirror
with lights on it and
you see the light
at a different cell
based on your position relative to an
ideal glide slope yeah so if you're
right on it you're right in the middle
and if you're below you're low
and as i add power
and maneuver the aircraft that ball
you know i see that ball rise you see
the ball low it's a lagging indicator
though right and your jet is a a lagging
engine too right it takes time to pull
up the engine so that adds to the
complexity you have to think ahead a bit
you know so you don't want to um
you can't just bring the
power up and leave it there you have to
bring the power up touch it bring it
back
and oh by the way your landing area is
moving not just away from you but also
on an angle right because we have an
angled deck and so you're constantly
doing one of these to correct yourself
as you go
and even every time you do one of those
yeah maybe it's a 30 degree angle bank
right i'm losing lift right yeah and so
i have to compensate with power each
time i do that so i'm doing another one
because you have to maintain um the same
level you're always lowering like it's a
constant rate of descent that's
increasing from about 200 feet per
minute to about 650 and every time you
do this that's messing with that
okay so you have to compensate doing
that manually do it manually all right
and then of course as you come down that
glide slope uh it becomes more and more
narrow and you have to of course um
modulate your inputs such that they're
smaller and smaller because they have a
bigger and bigger effect as you get
closer in
and what happens too when you're getting
close is that right before you cross
over if this is the boat right here your
table right before you kind of get your
wings over the boat itself
this big wind from the the main tower of
the boat is where it dips down so the
wind actually goes down it's called the
burble it'll actually pull the aircraft
down increase your rate of descent so at
that particular point you need to
you know increase your power and try to
compensate against that and so that's
kind of a third variable that's trying
to screw you up on your way down
what's the most difficult conditions in
which you have to land or you've seen
somebody have to land because i think
you were also
a signal officer as well i was yeah that
was the headlining signal officer for
for my squadron so you you've probably
seen some tough landings i have i've
seen a a ramp strike which is when a
part of the aircraft hits before um the
landing area which is
basically the round out of the boat that
is before the landing area so they
basically struck the back of the boat
coming in yeah it was just their hook so
it wasn't the aircraft
and they were fine that one was kind of
ugly um but it like rips that part of
the aircraft absolutely and then you
land on your bellies that kind of thing
in this particular case it hit and then
it it gave and essentially dragged the
hook on the on the surface after that
and so he was able to grab a wire at
that point when does that kind of thing
happen just a miscalculation by the
pilot or
is it uh weather conditions i wouldn't
even call it miscalculation i mean i'm
gonna put the blame on the pilot because
he's the only one in the cockpit but
then the day he's reacting to the
situations he's dealing with and so it
may be errors or he may be doing the
best with you know the conditions that
he's been given on that particular one
you just got two high rated signs very
common and that's when you see it with
new pilots you see it with older pilots
right new ones and complacent ones what
you see is they'll um
try to make the ball go right where they
want it in close they think they can
beat the game a little bit and they try
to and so we have sayings we teach we
teach pilots you know as a landing
signal officer we tell them like don't
re-center the high ball in close it's
one of the rules to live by and so when
the ball is up high don't try to bring
it back in close to like the center
point when you're when you're in close
because what you're doing you bring the
power off and you're gonna crash right
down and that's what happens right
because you got the burble pulling you
down you might be correcting which is
decreasing your lift
uh and then you have that type of
maneuver so how are you supposed to do
all this in harsh weather conditions
and so that's the one i wanted to tell
you about that's the hardest one and
what you hear is if you hear 99 taxi
lights on
that's a really shitty day 99 taxi
lights on what's that mean so everyone
put your taxi lights on because
you're about to land on the boat and you
don't see the boat weather is so bad
that the landing still officer on the
boat can't see you either and you can't
see the boat and you won't be able to
see it when you touch down
so we call that a zero zero landing
and you turn on the taxi light so that
the lso who has a radio in his hand that
looks like a phone from 1980
is talking directly to the pilot and
he's looking at that little light in the
rain and he's telling him you're high
you're low power
things like that come right back to left
and literally talking him down to land
on the boat right there and the pilot
usually it comes as a surprise to the
pilot delaney because he's just
listening to the voice you can't see the
ball can't see the boat and all of a
sudden you just hit the boat you crash
crash we're going about 1600 feet per
minute descent
at that point so you're still you're
going super fast
it's all this is happening fast you
don't know
you don't know what at
the moment it's gonna hit so you're just
going into the darkness and just waiting
for it to hit it's not dark though a lot
of times it's white into the light
you're going into into the light
and then there's a voice from an 80s
phone
i got it this this is terrible
um but so that you still
uh you still have to
so this kind of thing happens you still
have to land sometimes you just don't
have a place to divert but you know in a
sense we're trained for that because we
do the night landings as well and i
think you'll find this interesting but i
always found that the night landings
where in these particular cases
you're usually lined up behind the boat
maybe 10 15 miles whereas the other ones
it's like a tight circle the landing
pattern and so we can potentially see
the boat way out there um
if the lights were on which they're not
but we can maybe see like the string of
aircraft in front of us but what's
what's interesting is that it can take a
while i can t you might be 15 miles out
and
your lights are turned down as dim as
possible you have a cloud deck maybe at
six or seven thousand feet so that the
starlight there's no moon but let's say
the star light's blocked out right
because just the star light alone no
moon
you can see the boat you can see the
water
but when that goes away it's like
closing your eyes right you can't tell
anything it could be upside down
you could be in any position
and for me it was almost a meditative
process that i had to snap myself back
out of when i was on like a long
straightaway and then i would see the
light pop up in the sea of darkness
right no lights anywhere can't even see
the horizon and i just see a light out
there
my instruments are telling me and
they're turned down as far as they can
go right so i can barely see them so my
eyes can adjust and i'm just staring at
this light in the distance
and it's just very meditative and it's
the hum
behind you and
and then like four miles you know
it's almost like oh the light is a
little bit bigger and you almost kind of
have to snap back to it and be like i
need to like kind of like
look around a little bit and engage my
brain like back to my body and like
yeah do this cause you're gonna have to
actually land well is there
just you said you don't necessarily feel
the romantic notion of the whole thing
but is there some aspects of flying
where you look up and maybe you see the
star the stars
or um
yeah that kind of thing that you just
like holy crap how did humans accomplish
all of this like am i actually flying
right now
i used to have those moments on the boat
when i was catching planes land i would
i would they would trap and it'd be
nighttime and it's just all this chaos
in the middle of the ocean and nothing
and i would have these moments like how
the hell did i end up here you know
there's one moment in time next to an
aircraft landing on a boat in the middle
of the ocean you know
where did my life you know how did my
life go to end up here how interesting
but what i did start to enjoy was the
night vision goggles and putting those
on and looking up at the stars flying
around especially
over the ocean what do they look like
and there's so many there's just so many
stars that you know you normally can't
see they're shooting stars all the time
almost every flight you'd see them with
the goggles on
so it was a great pleasure to take
advantage of
the lack of light pollution in some
cases especially on deployment to go
grab some goggles at night and go out
some quiet spot in the ship that no one
can see me
and just kind of look around you know
yeah it's humbling
quick break bathroom break that wasn't
my quick quick stretch of legs
you got a few cool patches i do so
this is a vfa 11 red rippers patch uh
typically uh going actually on our arm
uh so this is actually what we call the
boar's head or arnold so this is
actually the
the boar's head from the gordon's gin
bottle
so yeah in 1918 we were in the we were
in london or the uk somewhere and we
apparently partied with the owner and
founder of
cornish gin we had a great time and
there's a signed letter in our writing
room that says we can use the logo in
perpetuity oh man
uh yeah so would like to give you that
patch
i drank quite a bit of gourd so this is
good
and then i'd like to give you that coin
uh from from our squadron
the red rippers that's a badass name
thank you brother you're welcome so
let's jump around a little bit but
let me ask you about this
one set of experiences that you had and
people in your squadron had so you and a
few people in the squadron either
detected ufos on your instruments or saw
them directly
tell me the full story of these ufo
sightings
and uh to the smallest technical details
because i love those
i'll do my best
so
we returned from and when i say we i
mean my not my squadron but vfa11 the
red rippers uh i was a
a somewhat junior pilot at the time i
joined them on deployment 2012
where they had been already out there
for about six months or so
um
operating in the vicinity of afghanistan
uh i joined them and then we we flew
back and still as a relatively new guy
we came back and we entered uh what's
considered a maintenance phase where we
slow down the tactical flying a bit uh
kind of recuperate
do some maintenance on the aircraft and
our particular model of the f-18 the lot
the lot number
uh was plumbed
for
the particular things that were needed
to upgrade the radar from what's known
as the abg-73 to the apg-79
and the abg-73 is a mechanically uh
scanned array radar uh
it's a you know perfectly fine radar but
the acer radar is kind of a you know
magnitude jumping capability kind of a
an analog digital kind of mindset so got
it so it's a leap to digital
uh avg 73 i mean are these things on a
carrier like what are we talking about
here this is how big is a radar yeah so
this is actually the radar it's in the
f-18 itself
okay so when you say that we're chosen
this is to test
uh the upgrade to the new the 79 abg 79.
less of an uh test and more of just hey
it's your turn to get the upgrade like
we're all going to these better radars
they were building ones off the off the
line with the new radar but we were this
weird transitionary squadron in the
middle that transitioned from the older
ones to the new ones
but it's not particularly rare to fly
with different types of radar because
in the and we call the fleet replacement
squadron essentially the training ground
for the f-18 you have all sorts of f-18s
with different radars so
you are used to having multiple ones but
in the actual deployable
combat squadron
um
we upgraded and when we upgraded we saw
that there were objects on the radar
that we were seeing the next day in in
this with this new radar that weren't
there with the old radar and these were
sometimes you know the same day you
might go on two flights the one in the
morning might be with all the radar the
one the evening with the new radar
and you and you'd see the objects with
the with the new radar and that's not
overly surprising in some sense uh they
are more sensitive uh perhaps they're
not filtering out everything they should
be yet or perhaps there's some other
type of error
maybe it needs to be calibrated
whatever it was relatively new and we
were somewhat used to there being
software problems with these types of
things occasionally just like anything
else
and so okay maybe this is a radar
software malfunction we're getting some
false tracks as we call them
um
what were you seeing
and so what we would see are
representations of the object so this is
off of our radar we're not seeing a
visual image here this is kind of like a
what's being displayed to us almost like
in a gaming fashion right like our the
icon right so the icon is showing us hey
something is there and here's the
parameters i can understand about it so
this is in the cockpit there's a display
that's showing
um some visualization with the radar is
detecting correct
and there's two different ways to do
that the first one is like the actual
data like the radar where
um i am
it's showing me the data kind of as if
it's in front of me and i'm selecting
those contacts and there's another
screen called the situational awareness
page and that's kind of a god's eye view
that brings all that data into one spot
and so i'm going to talk about this from
the essay page from the situational
awareness page versus the individual
radar ones because it's easier but okay
so sorry to linger on that so the
individual displays are like first
person
and then the essay
is
when you say god's eye view is like from
the top integration of all that
information
as if it's looking down onto the earth
yes is that a good way to summarize it
it is but for the aviator it's slightly
different because those two radar
displays i talked about are at the
bottom of that display
is kind of representative of where i am
and so i see what's in front of me got
it whereas the situational awareness
page
uh the aircraft is located in the center
of that
and then i all around me you know based
off of the data link and wherever i'm
getting information from
i can see that whole where page i can
see all the situation so
i'm going to kind of talk about this
from the situational awareness page
which is a top-down view just to kind of
frame our minds instead of jumping
around
and so what we would see out there is
we'd see these indications that
something would be there and they would
have a track file
that track file that thing that
represents the object has a line coming
out of it and that represents what's
called the target aspect indicator
um and there's some tracking from the
radar correct so it's showing you where
the object's going this is all pretty
cool that the radar can do all this so
radar locks in on the different objects
and it tracks them over time correct
that's coming from the radar that's like
built-in feature mm-hmm okay cool out
there we're seeing it so we don't have
to necessarily like pull things into our
our tracker in some sense right like
it's all out there and then we can kind
of choose the highlight on stuff or to
kind of focus in on it more so
but the information should all be out
there
and so we'd see that target aspect
indicator that that line on a typical
aircraft you know it would kind of look
like this it'd be coming out and it
would go steady and if they turn you you
know it'll be like
when you see them turn right like it's
not magic but this object they would the
target aspect would kind of
be like all over the place like kind of
randomly in the 360 degrees you know
from that top-down view that line would
be
in a place so kind of you know is it
unable to determine the target aspect is
it stationary you know and that's just
how it puts it out and it's not used to
seeing it so i'm not saying that's
necessarily super weird but it was
different than what we were used to
seeing because we weren't used to seeing
stationary objects out there very much
and what was also interesting is that
these weren't just stationary
on a zero wind day right these are
stationary at twenty thousand feet
fifteen thousand feet
five hundred feet
you know with with the wind blowing you
know
and so much like the sea you know when
we're up there fighting it affects
everything we consider the wind when
we're you know shooting missiles when
we're flying or fuel considerations it's
like operating you know in that volume
of air like the ocean everything's going
with the current
and so anything that doesn't go with the
current you know is immediately
kind of identifiable and strange and
that's why these were initially
strangers because they would be
stationary against the wind so if you
had something like a good drone
in the windy conditions what would that
look like would it would it not come off
as stationary would it sort of float
about kind of thing no i think with the
drone technology we have today they
could stay within a pretty tight
location well i meant like dji drone not
like cons i'm saying like generically
speaking i would not i'm not a military
drone no i just i have a dji drone
myself even and you know maybe not 100
knots but if that thing's in 30 or 40
not wins you know
the amount of
distance it's going to be kind of doing
one of these like that change is not
something i'm going to detect from maybe
many miles away interesting so it could
look very stationary
but that wasn't necessarily you know and
what's interesting about this story is
that there's not like the one smoking
gun right you have to kind of look at
everything and that's what i know i
don't like about
the department of defense and just
generally people's take on this is that
everything is kind of based around a
single image you know or that that one
case but a lot of interestingness comes
from the duration or the time it's been
out there how they're interacting
relative to other objects out there and
you don't get that information when you
just look at a frame for a second you
know everyone kind of bites off on the
shiny object but so you yourself
from your particular slice of things
you've experienced and seen directly or
indirectly you've kind of built up an
intuition about what are the things that
were being seen i want to go that far
i've just been able to you know
eliminate some some variables because of
how long i've observed it so like you
said yes can a drone stay in a
particular position against the wind
like that certainly but i don't think it
can do that and then go point eight mach
for four hours after that you know and
so
when you when you look at it outside of
that once that moment in time then it
eliminates a lot of the potential things
it could be at least from my perspective
so what kind of stuff did you see yeah
in the instruments we'd see them flying
um in patterns uh kind of racetrack
patterns or circular patterns or just
going kind of straight east
i occasionally see them supersonic 1.1
1.2 mach but typically 0.6 to 0.8 mach
just for extremely extended periods of
time you know essentially all the time
and this is airspace where there's not
supposed to be anything else at all
and it's pretty far out there it starts
10 miles off the coast goes like 300
miles can you say the location that
we're talking about off the coast of
virginia beach
got it and so nobody is supposed to be
out there
it's possible for people to be there
it's not necessarily restricted but it's
well monitored and we're out there every
day all day and so you know people know
to stay clear if a cessna goes bumbling
in there everyone's going to know about
it fa is going to you know call him out
he's going to tell us about it so
concursions happen not a big deal but um
they're pretty rare honestly because
everyone knows area and we've been
operating there for decades and what are
the trajectories at 0.6 to 0.8 mach that
these objects were taking
typically they would be in some type of
circular pattern or kind of racetrack
pattern when they were at those speeds
or i just see them kind of it wasn't
always like a mechanical flight
description and when i say that i mean
like an autopilot is going to be
just very precise right it's going to be
locked on straight and whereas i could
see an airplane i could tell if the
pilot's flying it right because it's not
going to be perfect the computer's not
controlling it and these seemed more
like that not that they were imprecise
but that they were even much more
erratic than that so like it wasn't like
a straight line in a turn it was just
kind of like a
you know weird drift like that in that
direction you know so it wasn't
controlled by a down computer or uh no
no disrespect to computers so it wasn't
controlled by autopilot kind of
technology that's not the sense that i
got
so how many people have seen them in the
squadron uh sort of how many times were
they seen how many
um
were there times when there's multiple
objects once we started seeing on the
radar enough and we would get close
enough we'd actually see them on our
fleer as well so our
advanced targeting
uh pod uh it's essentially a infrared
camera that we use for targeting mostly
in the air to surface environment
we don't use it in the air arena it's
just not that good of a tool
frankly
but
we would see ir energy emitting from
that location where the radar was
dropping us off so you know the radar
we'd lock onto the object and our
sensors would all look there and so then
we could see that it's looking at that
right piece of sky but
uh there's energy actually coming from
there so now we start thinking that okay
maybe not radar malfunctions maybe more
maybe something is physically here of
course and then people started to try to
fly by and see it and at this point
you know i would say maybe 80 to 90
percent of our squadron have probably
seen one of these on the radar at this
point everyone was aware of it
there was small communication i think
between squadrons of the same area that
had the same radar so i knew it wasn't
just our squadron for whatever strange
reason um because they would be other
squadrons would be out there and we
would talk to them like hey like careful
there's an object are you aware of that
you know so like they would be aware of
it
and then of course people would want to
go see what they look like right so
people would try to fly by i try to fly
by him i like how that's in of course
of course
of course you don't want to fly by it so
you know
there's an uh there's a argument against
that kind of perspective that maybe the
thing is dangerous so maybe we don't but
perhaps that's part of the reason you
want to fly by is to understand better
what it is if it's a threat we have a
lot of contact now that we did it back
then you know and so it was still a hey
is this a balloon is this a drone you
know at a certain point and we're also
aware of you know potential intelligence
gathering operations that could be going
on
we're up there flying our tactics we're
emitting uh we're practicing our ew you
know we're turning at particular times
like there's stuff that can be learned
it's not a secret and you know countries
keep different fishing vessels and
whatnot in international waters off
there so it's not exactly a secret that
uh we're being observed out there so to
think that a foreign hospital or a
foreign nation would want to
you know somehow intercept information
whether that's
our radar signals or jamming
capabilities to try to
break that down or understand it better
or be ready for that next fight
i mean
that's what that's what scares me about
this scenario because
we didn't jump right to aliens or ufos
we thought you know this is a radar
malfunction we need to be aware of it's
a safety issue and then
you know this could be a tactical
problem right here because
everything we do is based off a crypto
and and locate you know locations
everything is classified we do out there
right and so over time if you gather
enough data about those fights and just
monitor them forever just like uh some
nations uh do with other
uh piece of technology or software um
they could probably learn a line so we
have to be cognitive effect and defend
against it
so what can you say about the
other characteristics of these objects
like shape
size
texture
luminosity
how else do you describe object is there
something that could be said so you said
like this detect down radar step one now
you have clear images that can give you
a sense that it's actually a physical
object what else can be said about those
physical objects so eventually someone
did see one with their own eyeballs
multiple people and it and they saw it
in a somewhat interesting way
the object presented itself at
the exact altitude and geographic
location of the entry points into our
working areas
so we enter at a very specific point at
a certain altitude and people leave the
areas at the same point at a lower
altitude
probably one of the busiest pieces of
sky on the eastern seaboard
so two jets from my squadron went out
and they went flying and they entered
the area and when these objects went
right between the aircraft so they're
flying in formation and the object went
between the aircraft they went between
the object i think i don't think that
the object was moving i don't think it
aggressively went at them i think it was
located still there and then they flew
through it
but they didn't have it on their radar
um
and that would
i think the radar might have been
malfunctioning i don't know that for
sure i would like to look into it but my
supposition is that if their radar was
malfunctioning it would make sense that
they wouldn't avoid the object that was
there because they knew these were
physical at that point
um and we we would go up to these
objects all the time time and try to see
them we couldn't see them and we didn't
know what it was um was it that were
they just not there or being fooled was
something happening were they were they
moving dropping out to the last minute
you know we're going by pretty quick so
it's difficult to tell
but perhaps if his radar wasn't working
he wasn't receiving energy from the jet
and the jet of course didn't know that
it was there and so
whatever the case was they flew right by
and they described it just as a dark
gray or black cube
inside a clear translucent sphere and
the kind of the apex of the cube were
touching the inside of that sphere
that's an image that's haunting so what
do they think it is what did they think
at that moment uh that they
is it just this kind of cloud of
uncertainty that that they're just
describing a geometric object
it's not on radar so it's unclear what
it is
um yeah what was
uh the
any kind of other description they've
had of it in terms of
the intuition from a pilot's perspective
you know you have to kind of identify
what a thing is
to answer the first part they they
actually canceled the flight and came
back because they were you know it's
like if there's one of these out here
we're almost hitting them and it's right
there then um you know perhaps we need
to get a different jet with better radar
but so they came back and they're in
their gear and they're they're talking
to the front desk and talking to skipper
and like hey we almost hit one of those
damn things out there and this kind of
was one of those kind of slight
watershed moments where we all were kind
of like all right like this is a serious
deal now yeah you know maybe it was a
maybe we thought they were
balloons or drones or malfunctions or
maybe we thought it was fine but the end
of the day if we're to hit one of these
things then we need to you know we need
to take care of the situation
and that's actually when we start
submitting hazard reports or hazard reps
to the naval through the naval aviation
safety
kind of communication networks and it's
you know it's not like a big proactive
thing where people can go investigate
it's more of a data collection mechanism
so that you can kind of share that
aggregate data and make sure things are
uh progressing
um so it wasn't a mechanism that would
result in action being taken but we were
hoping to at least get the message out
to whomever was maybe running a
classified program that we were not
aware of or something like that that hey
like you could kill somebody here like
you've you've grown too big for your
britches here take a step back
so that was that was our concern at that
point that's kind of where we were
thinking this was going
what's the protocol for shooting at a
thing
was was uh
was there a concern that it's a direct
threat not just surveillance but
a thing that could be yeah a threat at
least from my perspective like that
never really crossed into my mind i
thought it was potentially an
intelligence
um you know failure that could be being
watched and information gathered
but i didn't think that it was something
that would
proactively engage me in a hostile
manner it wouldn't really make sense
either too
it would be shocking to like have one of
these objects take out an f-18 but
there's no real tactical advantage other
than fear perhaps
psychological
yeah i've learned a lot about
the
psychological warfare in ukraine this is
a big part of the war in terms of when
you talk about siege warfare about war
wars that last for many years
for many months and then perhaps could
extend to years but yes
it didn't seem
it didn't fit your conception of a
threatening
entity correct
so looking back now from the all the
pieces of data you've integrated
you've personally added what what do you
think it could be
i don't know i don't know what it could
be i think we've been able to categorize
it successfully into a few buckets
we've been able to say that you know
this could be u.s technology that
someone
put in the wrong piece of sky or you
know perhaps was developed and tested an
inappropriate spot by someone that uh
wasn't paying best practices is there uh
sorry to interrupt is there
a sort of uh modularity to the way
the the military operates to where it's
possible for one branch not to know
about the tests of another yeah i think
it's perfectly reasonable to think that
that could occur right and so if we just
make that assumption we can integrate
that into our analysis here and just say
okay but at the point we're at now you
know we have to assume that that's not
the case right with everything that's
been going on and the statements have
been made and the hearings
i think that if it was a
a
non-communication issue um we're in big
trouble at this point
what about it being an object from
another nation from china from russia or
even one of our allies perhaps right
maybe
you know
i don't think it's
um controversial to say that our allies
could be gathering information about us
or anything of that nature but that
would be an extreme case but i think
it's just important to say right to not
just say russia or china and just call
them the bad guys and assume that if
they don't have it no one can do it um
and so from my perspective you know
anyone else anyone else it doesn't
necessarily need to be a foreign power
it could be a non-government entity
perhaps although i think that's very
unlikely but again these are these are
things you must consider if you kind of
throw everything
everything other than the us under under
scrutiny
but you know from what
has been reported and the behaviors that
have been seen
it would be
i would expect to see remnants of that
technology elsewhere in the economy
there seems to be too many
things that require
advanced technology that would be
beneficial commercially as well as in
other military applications for it to be
completely locked away by
one of our competitors now i could see
us perhaps locking something away if
we're already in the lead and having it
to
pull out as needed but for someone
that's perhaps in a power struggle and
they're in second place
they might be more aggressive with the
development of different types of
technology willing to accept bigger
risks
do you think it could be natural
phenomena that we don't yet understand i
think that there are a number of things
that this is going to be right i don't
think there's one thing at the end of
the day but i certainly think that that
is part of what some of this could be i
don't think it's what we were seeing on
the east coast
and i don't think it is related to the
roosevelt incident or i'll even go out
and say the nimitz incident but what's
the roosevelt incident the roosevelt
incident typically referred to as the
gimbal
and or the go fast video and then the
nimitz is from uh
with the david fravor has uh witnessed
directly and spoken about
we'll talk about that as well i'd just
love to get your um
your sort of uh interpretation of those
incidents but
yeah so in this particular case natural
phenomena could be a part of the picture
but you're saying not the whole picture
yes
yes and we can't discount it
oh the other thing is what about the
failure of
pilot eyesight
like
sort of
some deep mixture of actual direct
vision
human vision system failure
and like psychology
like
um seeing something weird
and then filling in the gaps
because in order to make sense of the
weird i've tried to expose myself to
a scenarios like that that i don't
necessarily think are right but i've
explored them to see if they could have
some truth and one example is let's
imagine a scenario where if we're seeing
these objects every day off the east
coast
i can imagine a technology or an
operation where you had some type of
traditional propulsion system operating
drones in order to gather data like we
had discussed
and
i could i could envision a clever enough
adversary that could perhaps destroy or
somehow remove these objects and replace
them with new objects essentially when
we're not looking right and that
accounts for the
large uh airborne time and so i i
explore options like that and i try to
see you know what what evidence and
assumptions need to be made in order to
prove or disprove that
and you know
you would need so much infrastructure
you know you need some you need so many
assets and so i try to explore some of
those fallacies and some of those
concerns and as aviators we're trained
into many uh
like actual physical like eyesight and
kind of illusion training so like at
night time flying there's so many things
that can happen flying with false
horizons and so we receive hours of of
training on that type of of stuff but
this just falls outside the category
from my perspective what was the
visibility conditions when in the times
when people were able to see it and then
are we
we just earlier discussed complete
nighttime
darkness
um in this case was was it during the
day it was a perfectly clear day that
that particular incident yep
in a world that's full of mystery i have
to ask what do you think
is the possibility that
it's not of this earth origin
like the term non-human intelligence in
a sense
because
again
there's so much there's a lot of
assumptions in there that
may cause us to go down the wrong roads
it could you know these could be
something that our weather phenomena of
earth right or something else that is
just something we don't understand or
can't imagine right now that's still of
this earth um
if we consider
extraterrestrials or something that came
from a physical place far away in space
time
you know that leads us to some detection
assumptions that we would need to make
and so i just try to not categorize it
under anything and just say hey is this
demonstrating intelligence
and start from there as a single object
what can we learn about it kinematically
how it's performing what does that mean
for its energy source what does that
mean for the g-forces inside
and then step it out a level and say
okay how are these interacting with our
fighters if they are how are they
interacting with the weather and their
environment how are they interacting
with each other so can we look at these
and how they're interacting perhaps as a
swarm
especially off the east coast where this
is happening all the time with multiple
objects right and so we might be able to
determine some things about their maybe
you know center capabilities are the
areas of focus you know if we can
determine uh how they're working in
conjunction with each other but you know
seeing one little flash of an object uh
doesn't provide that type of insight
um but we have the systems four but and
it's kind of made on irony but it's it's
a fact of life the reality that many of
these well-deployed highly capable
systems are held under the military
umbrella which makes it difficult to
provide that data for scientific
analysis
so there's probably a lot more data on
these objects that's not being
that's not made available probably even
within the military for analysis i think
so yeah i think there's a lot of data
that could be made available
and you know that's one of the reasons
why you know i've been engaged with the
american institute of aeronautics and
astronautics to build you know a large
resources of cross-domain expertise so
that if or when that data is available
or that there's additional analysis
needed you know we can spin up those
teams and make that analysis
so there was a recently a house
intelligence subcommittee hearing on
ufos that you were a part of what was
the goal of that hearing and can you
maybe summarize what
you heard
the hearings from my perspective uh
seemed a bit disingenuous uh kind of top
level uh i think um who was the run by i
decided to interrupt like who were the
people involved and what was the goal
this day to go congressman andre carson
uh did chair of the committee and he he
was i think ultimately responsible for
bringing it all together you know i
think the intent from congress was to
try to bring light to
what has been happening with the navy
and to help show the american people
that um
congress is taking this serious because
something serious is happening
but you know the sense i got seemed a
bit disingenuous they talked around it a
lot they you know advertised their um
their love of science fiction um but
they you know they didn't treat this i
would say in the manner it deserved as a
potential tactical threat if it's coming
from a foreign power
and i get it though at the same day they
have very specific objectives within the
dod right they have a very important job
their job isn't necessarily to do
exploratory science for no reason
so i i applaud and i encourage their
efforts on the intelligence side to help
understand this but my concern is that
they
play a role they're not well suited for
which is is doing science and the
pentagon has opened a new office to
investigate ufos called all domain
anomaly resolution office
what do you think about this office do
you think it can help
alleviate the in the way which this
hearing perhaps has failed
to improve more the scientific rigor
and the seriousness of investigating
ufos i think that remains to be seen i
think it's a step in the right direction
but it's a step that was taken because
the previous step didn't happen
right so
the aoi msg was the
progeny essentially of the aaro or aero
and
you know the name was changed because
nothing was happening and it was
essentially just a confusing mess of
words that were created to make this
topic unpalatable
that airborne object identification
synchronization management group quite
the mouthful
uh i practiced that uh but the new all
domain anomaly resolution office you
know from my perspective at least at
least the perspective that they're
putting out they they seem to want to be
open they put out a twitter handle
they're out they're going out on twitter
and communicating saying they want to
keep this open
um but you know that's going to run into
a classification wall
well so uh dr sean kirkpatrick seems
like an interesting guy
he does yes
so he he's got a
um evan looked into deeply but he he
seems to have sort of he's coming from
like a science research perspective like
uh uh background so he he might be
at least in the right
mindset the right background to kind of
lead a serious investigation i think so
i'll just say generally um you know the
office has been receptive to aila
reaching out in order to collaborate uh
which has been a positive sign um also
pass the same kudos to um dr spurgle and
nasa's uh
effort as well
i i see these organizations that are
standing up i do see them as
as good faith efforts that are coming
about
through a lot of difficulty and
negotiation most likely right and i see
these as as a small
door opening that if we can take
advantage of can lead to
a much more productive relationship
between these organizations how do you
put pressure on this kind of thing does
it come from the civilian leadership
does it come from sort of congress and
presidents does it come from the public
does the public have any power to put
pressure on this
or
is the
the giant wall of bureaucracy going to
protect it against any public pressure
what do you think i think we've been in
in that latter state for a while but
you know society seems to be a bit
different nowadays you know
we have the ability to communicate and
to group and to to form relationships in
a way that haven't been able to
be present in the past we've been able
to
do research for better or worse on our
own you know in a way that hasn't been
able to happen before
and so
i sense that people are a bit less
willing to kind of buy the bottom line
statement from
those in power as they used to be back
when they didn't have access to those
tools
and so i do think there is a massive
role for the general society general
populist to play to show that they are
interested in this
because it's not that i don't think the
politicians or the leaders in the in the
pentagon it's not that they don't like
this topic necessarily or think it's
toxic per se but they exist in a culture
where this has been toxic and they don't
feel comfortable talking about it and
these are people that have spent their
entire careers you know working towards
a goal and getting to very high
positions within government
and so this is very against their nature
to take a stance on a topic like this
and so the fact that these are standing
up
even if they do have a small budget or
if they struggled a bit at first i still
think it's a massive change you know and
it's a big step away from that stigma
that has been pervading this topic for
so long
and you're actually part of alleviating
the stigma for
some somebody that's as credible as
intelligent as like varied in background
able to speak about these things that's
a big risk that you took
but it's extremely valuable because it's
alleviating the stigma i thank you for
saying that but it didn't feel like much
of a risk for me you know i didn't come
out about aliens right or whatever i
i had a safety problem that i started
asking questions about and you know i
went down a road as a navy trained
aviation safety officer right that sent
me to school for six weeks in pensacola
would be a safety officer you know
we're almost hitting these objects and
it's not something that happened in the
past and we want to understand it it's
happening right now like these these
occurrences are still happening aviators
are flying right now are still flying by
these things in fact
i mentioned i was a instructor pilot
i
had a student call me about eight months
ago or so
and he's like hey sir you know i made it
to the fleet finally
you know i had trained him how to fly
and then he goes to f18 he goes another
year of training and then he gets out to
his squadron on the east coast and he's
flying with the senior member of uh the
base nes oceana where the fighters fly
out of
um senior five row six and it was kind
of a bad weather day and so they said
hey you know if the weather's not good
enough for us to do this dog fighting
set we'll we'll go out and do a uap hunt
you know see if we can't find anything
or take a look at them you know i don't
know if it was ingest or not but you
know this they i actually would say it's
not just because there were there were
notices that were being briefed about
this being a safety hazard at this point
and so
i now that i i think about it it likely
wasn't just long story short they went
flying the weather was too bad they did
go into ufo and they physically saw one
you know and he called me up and said
hey sir i saw a cuban sphere they're
still out here you know years later and
so it's almost like a generational issue
you know for these fighter pilots at
least on east coast but that's great
that they can talk about it right
exactly exactly they feel at least
comfortable they have a reporting
mechanism and so that was one of the
problems that i noticed that we have a
lot of reporting mechanisms to take care
of safety issues and and even tactical
issues when the time is right in order
to keep track of what's going on but
there's no way to communicate about this
sure we could submit a hazard report but
nothing's actually being investigated
and if this is a tactical
vulnerability or something more it
deserves attention
if i could ask your sort of uh
take your opinion of the different
ufo sightings
that the dod has released videos on so
what do you think about the tic tac ufo
that
david fraver and others have cited
that's such you know truly anomalous
experience
i can't
do like mental models in my head to
find potential solutions to
discredit that right like as much as i
try right just as a logical process as a
practice i can't i can't pick it apart
in in the way that we were just talking
a moment ago about you know thousands of
drones being like sent up in very tricky
manners right i can't really bring
myself to
a clever solution that you know other
than just saying the pilots are lying or
is there you know and i believe you know
i i know dave fravor you know i consider
him a friend we talk a lot
i have zero zero reason to disbelieve
anything he says
yeah i agree with you uh
but in terms of the actual ufo
is there something anomalous and
interesting to you about that particular
case maybe
one interesting aspect there is
how much do i understand about the
water surface and underwater aspects of
these ufos it seems like a lot of the
discussions about is about the movement
of
this particular thing that seems to be
weird anomalous seems to defy physics
but what about stuff that's happening
underwater that's interesting to me
if i had advanced technology i would
certainly
like to operate in part underwater
because you can hide a lot of stuff
there
you think it would be somewhat as easy
as traveling through interstellar space
at least right yeah
you know i wish i had a great answer for
that but as an aviator that's a kind of
a black box for us you know we don't
have great what i would call cross
domain tracking right i can't see
something go underwater and then follow
it under water so it's literally not
your domain like underwater like leave
that for somebody else yeah and you know
i i use that terminology because it's
it's kind of important right um
cross-domain tracking uh is something
that we haven't had to necessarily worry
about right because airplanes operated
in the air and
submarines operated underwater and space
planes operating space right but you
know there's going to be
you know that's going to blur i think as
as we move along here especially in the
air and space regime
and being able to perhaps transition my
radar contact at 40 000 feet to another
radar system that can track it up to 200
000 feet
you know that might be a value and so we
seem to be missing that right now
so what about the go fast and the gimbal
videos that you mentioned earlier well
there was a like what's interesting
there
to you
so the gimbal i'll talk about that one
first i was airborne for that one um the
person that recorded it was a good
friend of mine
uh but i mean both their crew i knew
both of them but the the wizard himself
uh very close friends went through a lot
of her training together i went to the
same fleet squadron
he ended up transitioning to be a pilot
and then came to where i was instructing
so i got to struck him a bit on his
transition
um
and you know the way that was was was we
went out on a
air-to-air training mission so uh
simulating a air fight against our own
guys they're acting like the bad guys
and kind of go head-to-head against each
other
and when we fly on those missions we all
fly out together more or less
we set up and then we kind of a trite
from the fight as we either you know run
out of gas or something happens and so
people usually go back onesies or
twosies
and so the aircrew that recorded the
gimbal they were going back to the boat
and we were on what's called a workup
training event and so this is like a
month on the boat
where we're essentially conducting more
time operations more or less
to stress ourselves out and to kind of
do the last training block before we go
on deployment essentially so it's pretty
high stress uh they actually do send
aircraft from
like land bases to kind of try to
penetrate and we're expected to go
intercept them and so we're kind of
practicing like we play
and so
he saw these objects on the radar
the gimbal
and a fleet of other aircraft or
vehicles
and they initially thought it was
part of the training exercise that they
were sending something in to
try to penetrate the airspace
and so they you know they flew over to
it and as they got close enough to get
on the flear
uh you know i think everyone has heard
their reaction um and they realize that
it wasn't something they were expecting
to see
can you actually describe what's in the
video what's the reaction in case they
haven't seen it yeah a lot of swearing
uh but so what you see on the flear
footage is a
black or white depending on when you
look at it object that's somewhat shaped
like a gimbal it appears almost as if
someone put two plates together
and then there seems to be almost like a
small funnel of ir energy that's at the
top of the bottom of those plates in a
sense so almost as if
you know there's a stick going in
between two plates but not that
pronounced right so there's an energy
field that kind of went to a funnel on
the top and the bottom at least that's
how i was being portrayed on the fleer
there's a lot of conversation about that
being glare things that nature but it
was actually a very tight ir image it
just was non-descript shape
which was interesting typically we would
see the skin of the aircraft we can see
the flames coming out of the exhaust
especially at those ranges
um but and there was no flames or
there's no exhaust here there was no
exhaust there was no you know there was
no
outgassing of repellent in any manner
right it was just an object that had
nothing emitting from it that was
stationary in the sky we're not
stationary but it was it was um moving
along a path right it wasn't falling out
of the sky
and it continued along if we were to
consider it from a god's eye view again
on the sa page it continued along in a
path
and from the perspective that top-down
view
it just went another direction so no um
just an instantaneous direction change
from that perspective
you also hear them you know very
excitedly talking on the tapes about um
you know whatever the heck this thing is
and look at the essay there's a whole
formation of them
and so the essay is a situational
awareness page and again it's a large
display that gives that god's eye view
of all the radar contacts so the video
is actually showing just one
and then they're speaking about many of
them correct on the unless the essay
display correct and what they
essentially saw was if we were to
consider above the object north so kind
of offset to the north of the object
there was a formation of about somewhere
between four and six of these objects in
a rough wedge formation you know so kind
of side by side like this
and again not in a like autopilot type
manner where it was very stiff it was
very kind of
non-mechanical the flight mechanics
again and these objects were in that
formation and they were going along and
then they turned
pretty sharply but they still had a
radius of turn and then went back in the
opposite direction and during that turn
it was they were kind of like all over
the place like it wasn't tight they
weren't even like super i they weren't
flying in a way i would expect them to
be flying in relation to a flight lead
they were flying as if they were flying
close to each other but not in formation
which was kind of strange right
um
and then when they rolled out they kind
of tightened backed up like so when they
basically they started that turn and
then 180 degrees out essentially they
started flowing in the opposite
direction and kind of got back in that
formation and while that was happening
the gimbal object was proceeding we'll
say left to right
and as as those uh the formation kind of
turned up to the north and was just
passing back it the gimbal just kind of
went back in the opposite direction so
to follow it back in that direction
and in the in the flare itself you know
you see the object uh changes
orientation quite a bit so you see it um
more or less level maybe candid about 45
degrees
and then you see it kind of moving
around like this almost as if it was a
gimbal
i've come to learn after some you know
having seen some research online and
people really looking into this that
it seemed that the object actually
climbed during that maneuver and so the
reason it looked like it turned
immediately is because it turned like
this it turned uh in a vertical fashion
like that which was pretty interesting
that's kind of like another example of a
flight mechanics that we don't normally
operate because we don't change our
directions by maneuvering in the
vertical if we can help it it's
you're just killing the fuel you know
and so if you're like a surveillance
platform looking to spend as much time
around something you're not gonna you
know climb
500 feet every time you make a turn
unless you're
tom cruise unless your tom cruise
naturally
okay so is that one of the more
impressive flight mechanics you've seen
in in the vid in video forms or not the
direct
eyesight reports but like in terms of
video evidence that we have i think so
we we were seeing a lot of these but we
weren't just going on recording them all
day we we just kind of put them in that
safety bucket be like all right there's
objects over there we're just not going
to go near it you know and so we weren't
putting our sensors on them that much so
we were gathering the data kind of
secondarily but we weren't primarily
focusing on it to see all the details so
that's so fascinating because you have a
busy day you have a lot to do all right
well there's some weird stuff going on
there we're just not gonna go there and
that says something about sort of the
um about human nature about the the way
that bureaucracies function the way the
military functions it fills up your day
with busy important things and you don't
get to um i mean that is something that
i'm
in a sort of absurd way worried about
which is like we fill our days
with so much busyness
then when truly beautiful things happen
whatever they are truly anomalous things
we just won't pay attention
because they don't fit our busy schedule
beautiful i think that's right on the
nose
and it's on my nose because you know i
didn't give this topic the attention it
deserved until i left right until i left
and i went to
be an instructor pilot where
i had more time you know i had more
downtime to kind of process and think
and get out of exactly what you just
described and that's kind of what broke
me out of it and got me thinking more
about it why do you think the dod
released these videos
it's a great question
did the dod release it or they kind of
get out on their own in some sense so i
i don't know they answer that question
but my understanding of the situation is
that the dod
talked about them so much because
they're already out there in a sense and
so
you know they could they had a choice
where they could have just straight up
lied and said it wasn't theirs or it was
fake but uh again i think our culture
now is too open and their information
moves too freely to to do things like
that and it kind of left them in a
pickle that they had to respond to
so
what was the role of pentagon's advanced
aerospace threat intelligence program
atip from your perspective from what you
know maybe your intuition is a tip a
real thing that existed i was in a
position as an aviator that never would
have exposed me to anything like that
but i was curious about what people knew
and i i think in my mind maybe hoped or
you know hope someone was looking into
this in some sense but
on the day that gimbal was recorded i
heard that they caught something extra
interesting on the flea
and i went to the intel deep brief space
to go see the the film and you know
everyone's gathered around watching it
very interesting and i heard the admiral
was coming down and so i was like i'm
going to hang out back you know quietly
my own business and see i just want to
see his reaction try to read it to see
if this is brand new or if it is
something that they've been dealing with
you know
and you know he came in and he watched a
video for like five or six seconds and
went
and like turned around and walked out
and you know i was like he's definitely
seen these before there's no way that
you only watch that for a few seconds
and don't have more interest
it was you know too bizarre
so
kind of going back does the office exist
well you know i've heard that though the
admiral
essentially reported back to the
pentagon about that that
case
real time essentially after he left
right so he basically went back and i
was totally reported that to either atep
directly or to other you know somehow
the information got there so from my
perspective and from what i've
experienced
it seems like yes it was a thing but you
know as an aviator i wouldn't know
either way right that's just my
experience from what happened but it
seems like there's somewhere
to report to
at the time it seemed like there was at
least some place to complain to it's not
report to
let me ask you about sort of um people
that are taking a serious look at at the
videos and just the different ufo
sighting reports
uh so there's a there's a person named
west who uh is a skeptic and tries to
take a skeptical view on every single
piece of evidence on these ufo sightings
uh what do you think about his analysis
he tries to
analyze in a way that debunks some of
these videos
and assign probabilities to their
explanations sort of leaning towards
things that uh
give a very low probability to
um
alien extraterrestrial type of
explanations for these ufos what do you
think about
his approach to these uh analysis well
two parts to his approach one uh i
commend him for all the good work and
effort he put into it um i've seen him
build some models and things of that
nature
and so i think that's something that's
absolutely needed in this environment no
one's asking anyone to believe anyone
here right uh trust but verify should
certainly be the mantra
but where i have uh you know a
disagreement with his approach is that
he's approaching from you know from a
skeptic or from a debunker standpoint
and you know from my perspective not not
speaking for everyone but um when i hear
that that tells me that you're driving
towards a particular conclusion
um which has been a very safe
process for the past x years right it's
been it's been like a very safe business
to be in to tell people that they
haven't seen aliens but uh times have
changed a little bit and
the tactics i've seen to try to retain
that
view on reality
um has included things such as
completely dismissing what the air crew
are saying um and i think that is a
fallacy to think that we have to take
the human outside of that analysis so
those are the two things i disagree with
when you uh put the night vision on and
you look at the stars and you look out
there and in the vast cosmos only a
small fraction of which we can see
um
how many intelligent alien civilizations
do you think are out there do you think
about this kind of stuff i do
you know i'm i'm of the theory that we
are not the only people out there i
think it's it's it would be a
statistically silly comment to assume we
are although i get that we are the only
data point that we currently have
although
i'm willing to jump over that fence and
say that yes there most likely is
intelligent life elsewhere uh although
i'll concede that it is a possibility we
are early or it could be limited or it
could be
in a manner that we don't recognize or
can really understand
i i spend so much time thinking about
how we anthropomorphize things on this
ufo topic and we've done it to ourselves
with media in a sense right we've
trained ourselves what to think about uh
what we think is true or what this would
be like
and by doing so i think we're closing
ourselves off to a lot of what the
possibilities could be and the things
that we could miss
you beautifully put
that the thing that drew you to fighter
jets is the technology so if you were to
think
to imagine from an alien perspective
what kind of technologies would we first
encounter as human beings
if we were to meet another alien
civilization
in the next few centuries
what kind of thing would we see so
you're now at the cutting edge and you
see the quick progress that's happening
that was happening throughout the 20th
century that's happening now with
greater degrees of autonomy with robots
and that kind of stuff what do you think
we will encounter
i think we're gonna see uh the ability
to manipulate matter like we used to
manipulate information like i think
that's what um whether that means
being able to pop something on the table
that didn't exist or to
influence a chemical reaction somewhere
but being able to manipulate and
treat matter as if it was information
and so being able to design specific
materials being able to
move past a lot of the barriers that
seem to limit our progress with things
such as miniaturized fusion or even just
fusion in general
is you know a lot of it is is matter
based as material based and our ability
to not
manipulate we can only discover
materials in a sense and so i think that
a complete mastery of the physical
reality would be one of the key traits
of a very intelligent species well
you're actually working on some maybe
you can correct me but sort of quantum
mechanical simulation to understand
materials
so is that do you see sort of the the
early steps that we're doing on quantum
computing side
to
start to simulate to deeper understand
materials but maybe to engineer to mess
with materials at the at the very low
level that aliens would be able to do
and hopefully humans would be able to do
soon
yeah i think that's you know so if we
think about
how what materials are made of it's just
a collection of atoms but each one of
those atoms has a lot of data associated
with it so if we want to kind of
calculate how they interact with each
other
it requires a massive amount of
computational resources so much so that
it can't be done in a lot of cases with
classical computers and that's where
quantum computers come in
although we don't have a perfectly
functioning quantum computer at this
point
one of the things that we're working at
at quantum general materials is to
essentially bridge that gap between what
a classical computer can do as far as
simulating materials and of course what
a fully functioning quantum computer
would mean for being able to design
materials and so you know having the
ability to study matter at a very
fundamental level and unleashing
artificial intelligence and machine
learning on that problem
i think is you know in a sense you know
alien in a way that we're able to
advance our science using you know a
process that we may not fully understand
with a perhaps a non-human based
intelligence in some sense and so we may
find patterns in the the processes right
how does our machine learning output you
know can we we match behaviors with
um what we're observing with what maybe
a machine learning element with output
right can we try to classify the
intelligence in that manner perhaps
um and so you know at gen mads we're
looking at these materials
we're considering what these algorithms
could have used for later on um
could we perhaps reverse the process and
determine what a unique or anomalous
material what type of properties it
potentially could have
and you said gen matt right
what's uh what is jen matt gemnet is a
quantum gender of material so uh it's
the company i work for
we essentially
are working on a couple of verticals one
of them is our quantum chemistry work
we're essentially we're bridging the gap
between essentially physics and
chemistry uh we're working uh on those
problems and and again implementing
artificial intelligence machine learning
into that process so that we can design
those materials from the ground up
additionally
we are what we consider a vertically
integrated material science company
which means we can generate our our own
data and so
um
within the next quarter coming up we we
are launching a satellite in the space
they'll have a fairly advanced
hyperspectral sensor in there which is
intended to be the first launch
uh that will help us
detect different types of materials uh
using our advanced knowledge of uh
quantum chemistry right we're gonna be
leveraging that experience in order to
better analyze that data oh interesting
so uh materials that are strange
or novel
out there in space not necessarily but
we'll be looking back at earth to be
able to detect deposits on earth god i
got it getting the greater perspective
for mountain space to do analysis of
different materials correct interesting
yeah i was really impressed by the
deep mine i got to hang out deep
deepmind recently and they really
impressed me the the possibility of the
application as you're saying of machine
learning in the context of quantum
mechanical simulation for materials so
to understand materials
it's uh it's really really really
interesting um so
manipulate matter huh i would say the
next thing is
horses right or maybe fields so um
you know manipulating or managing
gravity um can we you know um maneuver
within fields in some manner that allows
us to um perhaps move propellantless or
in other manners right and so
i think essentially
having a deeper understanding of um
you know different fields and being able
to interact with them
i think would be you know a potential
avenue for you know travel or advanced
travel right um propel let's travel um
can we can we quantum entangle gravity
fields together and propel our ship via
you know the gravity field of a planet
the massive planet and a drive on a ship
you know there's all sorts of
interesting things but
um
yeah people look back at people like you
and say wow they used to fly
like
with this kind of propellant it seems
like to be a very antiquated way of
flying and they were very impressed with
themselves these humans that they could
fly like birds
uh it's like so much energy
is used to fly such short distances from
their perspective we can only throw so
many rocks at the back yeah there needs
to be a better way exactly it just seems
dumb like these
it's like flintstones or something like
that good at it but yeah there's a limit
right like we need something good
i mean that that's an interesting sort
of uh trade-off how much do you invest
in getting really good at it i tend to
believe the reason why
it would be very important
and very powerful to put a human on mars
is not necessarily for the exploration
facet
but in all the different technologies
that come from that
so the in putting our there's something
about putting humans in extreme
conditions
where we figure out how to make it less
extreme more comfortable and uh for that
we invent things like
the dod sort of helping invent the
internet and all the different
technologies we've invented it's almost
like an indirect consequence of solving
difficult problems whether that problem
means
winning wars
or colonizing other planets and so i
don't think mars will help us figure out
propulsion systems or to crack open
physics to where you can travel close to
the speed of light or fasten the speed
of light but it will
help us figure out how to build some
cool technology here on earth i think
um so it's i'm a big proponent of doing
really difficult things really difficult
engineering things to um to see what
kind of technologies emerge from that
but
let me ask you this do you think u.s
government is hiding
some technology
like alien spacecraft technology
i have no information either way
and if you did you probably wouldn't
tell me but my assumptions you know how
like what did my heart tell me my heart
tells me something's going on but i have
no evidence for that
maybe that's me wanting something to go
on maybe that's a human feeling to want
to know that my government's in control
of what some strange unknown thing is
um
[Music]
what's your sense if such a thing
happened would uh
with this kind of information leak with
this kind of information be released by
the government
i mean that's the worry that you have is
because when you don't understand a
thing and it's novel you you want to
hide it so that
uh some kind of enemy doesn't get access
to it and use it against you
i wonder if that is the underlying
assumption i it's a it's the one people
always jump to that it's for to you know
to
maintain secrecy of technology and i
assume that's part of it i wonder if
there's any other reasons that we would
want to not talk about it i imagine that
in such information would have a shock
to these you know social economic system
of any country if not the world
and so i wonder if perhaps that was part
of the concern as well you know how
society can react to it maybe we're
anti-fragile enough now with everything
that's going on and with our
communication networks that um
you know why not now i don't know but
it's uh that's something i think about
as well
yeah the effect on the
the mass psyche
uh of of something like this
that uh
that there's another intelligence out
there
we had trouble enough to deal with the
pandemic
to have something of this scale
basically having just an inkling
of a phenomena that we have no
understanding of and could lead to
complete destruction of human
civilization or a flourishing of it
and what do you do
what does the bureaucracy of government
do with that yeah especially when
they're the ones holding the range of
power and such a communication would
relinquish that power essentially to
some degree
since you think there's aliens out there
and
you're somebody that's thought about war
quite a bit do you think alien
civilizations
when we meet them would want war
would would they be a danger to us would
they be a friend to us
what's your intuition
about intelligences out there
my intuition tells me that when two
people like yourself and myself or
anyone get together
often the output is greater than
individuals
and when we work together we can
typically do things
that are more impressive and better than
if a single person works alone
and now i know that
war has
driven technology technological
progress
but perhaps there's other mechanisms
that can do so but regardless
i wonder you know if we truly think
about an advanced society that has been
perhaps thousands or millions of years
ahead of us
i would imagine that same
same truth to be there that people
working together creatures working
together is a good thing for
society or its society as a whole
and if we consider that
as
we imagine a society growing and
expanding in a sense the ultimate
output of a planet could only be
achieved in some senses if everyone was
working towards the same goal and there
might be
you know wonders and secrets and things
that we can't imagine just simply
because of time frames that we we live
under and we think in
but if a planet has a single unit and it
almost as an entity itself at a certain
level right if everything's working
towards the same output you know i could
almost imagine an intelligent species
that approached us planted the planet
instead of person to person because
that's how they've evolved and they've
assumed any intelligent species would
understand that working together is
better than not
and so you know my heart tells me that
at a certain point um you know love and
caring and desire to work together is
much more powerful than you know the
technological progress that war would
bring
i hope so as well
well let me jump to the ai topic that
you've done
so you've done research and development
efforts focused on multi-agent
intelligence for collaborative autonomy
machine learning ai stuff that we've
been talking about for combat
for air-to-air combat man unmanned
teaming technologies all that kind of
stuff
what's some interesting ideas in this
space that um fascinate you
randomness
you know being able to to not predict
what the enemy is doing almost no matter
what because there's a level of
randomness that's within the tactical
envelope
um even a utility of randomness the
utility of randomness in a an increase
sounds like a book you should write
and it would be a good title name my
band
name of your band yeah uh so yeah can
you elaborate that so like
trying to deeper understand how you can
integrate randomness
uh through ai
in the context of combat in order to
make yourself
in order to take away the enemy's
ability to try to predict what you're
gonna do to disrupt their technological
progress cycles
uh so that they don't have a clear
target to aim at and if you don't have a
clear target to aim at it's hard to hit
it
additionally more distribution of assets
and capability so imagine being able to
digitally
model your
your weapon or your system or your
entire tactical engagement or scenario
or allow machine learning to help you
better understand the technology
that you need to build in order to
defeat a particular scenario right and
i'm talking hardware now not just the
tactic itself
and you know being able to use large
amounts of simulation and machine
learning to build individual assets that
are small boutique using advanced manual
factoring
techniques for a mission or for a
particular battle right instead of just
having these large things against an
enemy you're building systems and
technology for individual cases
what about manned and unmanned teaming
so uh man and machine working together
is there interesting ideas there i
approach it from the um
position that
the human should be
commanding from the highest level
possible right so
mission objective
based targeting and so if
just for example if there's a building
here and i want that building to go away
that's the message i want to communicate
i don't want to tell certain vehicles to
be in a certain spot i don't want to
know how much fuel i have i don't even
want to know what capabilities they have
necessarily i just want to know
that i have the ability to select from a
cloud of capabilities and the right
assets are going to arrive such that
they deal with the contingencies around
the target such as protection systems or
ew and then can prosecute the target to
the higher enough probability of
satisfaction that's needed by the
mission command and that's the power of
the the human mind is it's able to do
some of these strategic calculations but
also ethical calculations all that kind
of stuff exactly that's what humans are
good at
does it worry you
a future will have increasingly
higher autonomy in our weapon systems in
our war so you said building
what about
uh telling a set of
fully autonomous drones to get rid of
all the terrorists in this city
so these multiple buildings
region
that kind of it's a greater and greater
um
autonomy
so that that's a fear right um
you're viewing it from a we can cover
more perspective which is um
fair and
a lot of
we i don't approach it from that topic
at least i don't think of it that way at
least morally
um
i think that with the advancement of
warfare assuming we have a justin and
moral leadership
um if that's the case then
i am an advocate for increased autonomy
and technology because i see it as an
ability to be more precise
and if we trust the moral leadership of
our
government then we would want to be as
precise as possible in order to mitigate
effects that we don't want
so
i know that's not a satisfying answer
and it leaves us well no bad feelings
but no because having experienced sort
of um
directly seeing
what it looks like
when deliberately or
carelessly
war leads to the death of a large number
of civilians it doesn't currently in
ukraine
the the value of precision
given ethical leadership becomes
apparent
so there's something
distinctly unethical about the the
murder of civilians in a time of war
and i think technology helps lessen that
of course all death is is terrible
but there's there's something about um
schools hospitals
being destroyed with everybody inside
being killed um
yeah it's particularly terrible
it is
and you know you approached it from the
angle of more autonomy enables a wider
you know swath of destruction and
that's where we get back into you know
who who's making the decisions based off
of this and
you know my hope again would be that we
would have the leadership that would use
these things when needed in the precise
way as possible to minimize that and
i've seen that firsthand you know i've
seen that in country i've seen
not not blue forces but you know i've
seen truck bombs go off on school buses
you know driving around afghanistan
uh
while escorting convoys and you know it
wasn't easy then and i'm sure it's not
any easier now especially after what
you've just seen
do you have thoughts about the current
war in ukraine maybe from a military
perspective
maybe from the air force perspective so
i can just mention a few things there's
the uh baraktar drones that are being
used
uh they're unmanned i think they have
capability to be autonomous but they're
usually remotely controlled they're used
for reconnaissance but they're also used
by the ukraine side for reconnaissance
and
i think um
also to destroy
different technology tanks and so on
different targets like this
uh so there's also on the on the russian
side the the orlan 10
there's the the fighter jets
uh mig-29 the ukraine side and the su-25
and the russian side is there anything
kind of stands out to you about this
particular
aspect of what this war looks like
that's unique to what you've experienced
maybe not unique but it's just been
absolutely incredible to see
the footage you know i mean we're
watching
war on twitter you know essentially and
to see you know these aircraft flying
down low spitting flares out getting
shot down it's you know it's incredible
to see this happening you know
live for everyone to see
um so that's just kind of a quick meta
comment but as far as the actual you
know i think these small form factor
uavs where they're just like strapping
weapon to it and flying over and trying
to drop it at the right time or any of
this these type of commercial
applications of technology into this ad
hoc warfare area is incredibly
interesting because it shows you know
how useful that technology can be
outside of the military right like these
like especially like dji right like
there's obviously a lot of technology in
there is being leveraged for other
capabilities within you know plc
military uh or at least we would assume
um
what happens if that is more widespread
right like what if we were creating our
own drones and they were being used
against us would we want to have some
type of kill switch or something like
that right so
what i think governments are going to
have to consider like all these tools
that are going to be easily available to
just any person could be turned into a
tool of war how do we stop that from
being turned against us you know
especially as we look at you know 10
years from now when we have a large
number of autonomous uavs delivering
packages and doing everything else over
our country and any one of those could
be potentially a weapon if we don't have
the proper security well there's we're
now in texas and texas values its guns
and sees guns as among other things a
protector
of individual freedom and you can see a
future perhaps where and i've certainly
have experienced this in
the empowering nature of this in ukraine
where you can
put the fight for independence into your
own hands by literally strapping
explosives to ggi drones that you
purchase on your own salary i mean that
one of the interesting things about the
voluntary army in ukraine
is that they're basically using their
own salary
to buy the ammunition
to fight for their independence this is
the very kind of ideal that sort of uh
people speak about when they speak about
the
second amendment in this country
that
it's interesting to see the advanced
technology version of that especially in
ukraine sort of using uh computer vision
technology for
uh surveillance and reconnaissance to
try to
um and integrate that information to to
discover the targets and all that kind
of stuff um to put that in the hands of
civilians it's fascinating to see to
sort of fight for their independence you
could say that to fight
against um authoritarian regime of your
own government all that kind of stuff it
shows you how complicated the worst
space in the future is going to be you
know invading a land like that where
people have you know that many different
types of resources can absolutely change
warfare
i mean hopefully
that creates a disincentive to start war
to go to war with a yeah sort of it
changes the nature of guerrilla warfare
yeah you know i don't think putin was
expecting to be in that engagement quite
as long as he has of course
but it can show you how you can get
caught up you know if if land wars turn
into
an inescapable quagmire each time due to
the complications around the
the society's ability to access
interesting tools
you know that it could be you know it
could be a huge demotivator for
aggression
well let me ask you about this do you
think there will always be war in the
world
is this just a part of human nature
i think so
i think i think it is uh
until we until we move past resource
limitation
there's always going to be at least that
one particular cause
of conflict
and then we can also consider all our
psychological
lizard brain emotions that cause us to
act out although you know we're
hopefully we have enough things in place
to stop that from
rising to the level of war but you know
we have our own biology our own
psychology and evolution to combat
um and then but there are pragmatic
reasons to exert violence sometimes
unfortunately and that one of those
cases could be resource limitations and
so while your question was do i think
there'll always be war in this world i
my unfortunate answer is perhaps yes but
once there's more than one world then
we're less resource constrained then
perhaps it'll be a valve of sorts for
that
i talked to
joko on this podcast i i i told him
about a song
called brothers in arms
by dire straits
and uh the question i asked them i'd
like to ask you the same question is
like the song goes
do you think we're fools to wage war and
our brothers in arms
and jacob said
our enemy is not our brothers and arms
they're the enemy
and so this kind of notion that we're
all human
that's a notion that's a luxury you can
have
but there is
good and bad in this world according to
jocko
i hear that
anger and hate when i
was in ukraine among some people
were
there was a sense where you could be
brothers and sisters you can have family
you can have love
for
from ukraine to russia
um but now that everything changed and
generational hate for some people have
taken over
so i guess the question is um
when you think about the enemy
is there hate there to acknowledge that
they're human
i'd never had any hate or discontent
you know when i was doing my job i'll
say
but i was also never in a true life for
death situation where they were gonna
kill me if i didn't kill them
um
but you know i think that environment
isn't one born out of hate
you know being in that type of scenario
you know a sense how to be alive right i
mean that's the our natural state is be
fighting for our survival in a sense and
so i think there's there's great
power and strength and clarity perhaps
in that and it's not always borne out of
of hate but out of necessity and we
can't always control that and i think as
we focus on ourselves so much
we only dance on that pinhead when we
find ourselves fighting for things that
we need and we're always taking from
someone else at this point and so
as someone that's been in combat and
very high above it i'll say right where
i didn't feel like i was in particular
danger
um
i i rationalized it and i made my wife
do it knowing that there were people on
the other side that were going to die
that were on our side than not so it was
always a very human thing it was never
um
a reaction emotional reaction of any
sense so you do you were able to see
the basic uh it's human versus human
there's some aspect of war that is
basically
um one people fighting each other
yes at the end of the day you know
especially i would say in aviation
tactical aviation there's almost a
kinship with your your enemies in a
sense because you know that
you know them in a sense right you know
what they've been through
you know what training they've been
through you know where they've failed
and you know what type of person they
are because it's a very unique person
that does that job and usually can spot
them i guess it's the kind of respect
you have
for
the craftsmanship of the job that's
taken on certainly and that person
didn't come out in his 100 million
dollar jet because i pissed him off you
know it's it's not an emotional response
we're both there
maybe because we chose to be in some
sense but at the behest of of someone
else and outside of our control and
power and so in a sense for me
it's almost a challenge that we've
engaged upon agreeably but that's such a
romantic version that i have the luxury
to have being high in my castle in the
jet up there not on the ground so i
understand that it's a bit more romantic
than perhaps
you know someone on the ground
experiencing all the horrors down there
because everything looks very small from
above
and that's another aspect of war with
greater autonomy when you're controlling
the mission versus
uh
you know
have a genghis khan type of intimacy in
terms of the actual
experience of war where you directly
have
you murder with a sword versus a gun
versus a remotely controlled drone
versus a strategic mission assignment to
an autonomous drone that executes
abstracted away until it's just a small
decision
and my worry
is the people without a voice
are
are completely forgotten and silenced in
all these calculations i spoke to a lot
of people
poor people
that feel like they've never really had
a voice and um
and they're too easily forgotten even
within the country of ukraine
it's the uh
the um
big city versus the rural divide
you know it's easy to forget the people
that
don't have a twitter account and don't
um
that their basic existence is just
trying to survive trying to put food on
the table they don't have anything
else
um anything else and they are the ones
that truly feel the pain of war
of uh the supply chain going down or the
food supplies going down of of a cold
winter without power
um
you're still young
but you've seen some things
so uh let me ask you to put on your wise
sage hat and uh give advice to young
people
whether they're fascinated by technology
or fascinated by fighter jets
whether they're fascinated by sort of
engineering or
the way the stars look at night
what advice would you give them how to
have a career they can be proud of or
how to have a life they can be proud of
i'd suggest that they
don't fear looking foolish
i spent a large portion of my life
uh considering the laughter or the the
comments up my statements as uh
indication that i shouldn't pursue that
and so you know
i didn't i kind of woke up to that fact
a bit later but i would encourage
you know i would advise that that people
you know trust in themselves and trust
in the things that they care about it
doesn't matter if they're good at it
all that matters is that they find
something that they can apply
love and care to and they will grow
better at it and they'll most likely
make the world better because of it
and don't be afraid to look stupid don't
be afraid to look stupid
uh yeah that's one of the things that i
think as you get older you're expected
to be
to have it all figured out and so you
are afraid to take on new things
uh but i think as long as you're always
okay looking stupid and having a
beginner's mind you can you can get
really really far even later on in life
so this isn't just advice for young
people this is really advice for
for everybody
maybe a dark question but um has there
been
a difficult time in your life a really
dark place you've gone in your mind
that stands out they had to really
overcome
i would suggest that i've been
a pretty firm ground for most of my life
i haven't had
too many
personal tragedies i'll say that have
really defined
me
um certainly none that i would think are
outside the norm so there was no
truly low point
actually i have one and it's tough for
me because
i you know i've spent most of my life
beating motions and and you know
uh high high emotional responses out of
my system right because that's what
flying is right it's keeping a steady
line and and doing what you need to do
in fact there's been studies that have
shown reduced uh um adrenaline
production inviter pilots for a number
of years after they get out but getting
out of the navy was difficult for me you
know it and i wasn't expecting it to be
a lot of bravado and machoism of course
in the military
especially the fighter community
and we all have our plans made up to get
out and none of it really
accounts for any type of mental health
or anything like that it's all very much
where am i going to get my paycheck from
where am i going to move to and you know
whether it's navy or just individuals
truly understanding the difference that
makes when i got out it was it was
difficult for me i you know i think a
lot of guys in that job when they get
out they almost
at least i i had anxiety when i got out
because it was
i was so used to being highly involved
in something that
um
that you know just was i was involved
with that when i got out i didn't know
how to fill that space essentially you
know
um and while i wouldn't say it was an
overly traumatic experience i think it's
one that's not accounted for enough that
people that are getting out you know so
i would encourage them to take it
serious and actually think about it and
respect the change because it is a big
one
well
if i may say you found a place in nature
currently a home
is there uh can you speak to that being
a source of happiness for you absolutely
an escape from the world certainly it
very much is
was it deliberate that you found it
there
that's home for me so you know i moved
back up to the the boston area and
my wife and i had an idea after moving
about eight or nine times in the navy of
kind of what we what we wanted just
generally and it was all really about
the land and not about the house you
know we just wanted privacy and to be
nearby
and so we end up finding a lot of land
there you know a parcel of land we put a
house on it and it provides me with a
sense of peace that
i think i can only get when i'm in
nature
a sense of clarity that helps me think
helps me relax
maybe so relaxing that helps me think i
don't know but being surrounded by
nature and birds and animals for me has
always
allowed me to
i don't feel most in touch with
with my own thoughts in a sense
it just provides clarity
and so this little sanctuary you could
say i've built
allows me to to you know interface via
fiber line at my house but also feel
like i'm a million miles away sometimes
which is the best of both worlds hey you
can just walk outside to escape it all
yes to experience life as as
hundreds of generations of human species
have experienced it maybe it's a
dichotomy my desire for the fastness of
technology and experience
compared with the most basic baseline
that we have
isn't that strange how do you how do you
square that i don't know your draw how
drawn you are to the cutting edge
and still the calm you find in nature i
think it makes sense nature is
vastly superior to almost all of our
technology
it's a way it's being surrounded by
perfection in a lot of senses
in the military and in general have you
contemplated your mortality have you
been afraid of death what was what's
your relationship like with death
i was willing to accept
an oversized amount of risk i'll say
when i was younger as an aviator yeah
not not in the jet but just that was my
life you know i felt like i was going to
live forever
um
and going out in the war you know
strangely didn't really change that
because
you know as an aviator again we're
riding up high on our horse up there so
there were times when i was in
situations that could have resulted in
death from from flying or from emergency
in the aircraft but
i'll be honest i never really kind of
sat down to think about the morale the
mortality of it afterwards i feel like i
kind of signed a check at the beginning
and it was my job to perform as well as
i could and if something happened in
that then i better damn well be sure i
would do my best at the time then
um so you know i i maybe didn't
personally reflect on it as much as of
it i
one would think you know because once
you get in that machine it doesn't give
you a lot of time to sit back and
philosophize on
on your current situation and that same
just like we weren't seeing these off or
when we seen these objects off the coast
we weren't necessarily you know
examining them every day right we'd put
him into that bucket because it wasn't
something that was going to kill us
right away
and thinking about death when you're so
close to it all the time would be
debilitating
it would probably make you worse at your
job it would
well maybe you can think about death
when you look out when you go out into
nature and think like the
the
the fact that this whole ride ends this
is such a weird thing and the the old
makes way to new
and that's all throughout nature and if
you just look at the the cruelty of
nature or the beauty of nature however
you think about it the the fact that the
the big thing eats the little thing
over and over
um and that's just how it progresses and
that's how adaptation happens
death is a requirement for
uh evolution
and you know
whether evolution allows us to see
objective reality or not
it still gives you some interesting
thoughts about perspectives of death and
especially concerning it's a biological
necessity as far as evolution is
concerned
yeah it's weird it's weird that uh
there's been like a hundred billion
people that lived before us
and that you and i will be forgotten
this whole thing we're doing right now
is meaningless in that sense but at the
same time it feels deeply meaningful
somehow
um
i guess that that's the question i want
to ask when you go out to nature
family
what do you think is the meaning of it
all what's the meaning of life
or maybe when you put on the night
goggles the the night vision goggles and
look up at the stars
why we're here i can't speak for
everyone but
at least the way i interpret it you know
or at least i i feel like i interpret my
way here my job is i feel like my role
is just to be
curious about the environment in a
manner that allows us to understand as
much as possible
i think that the human mind
whether it's just the mass inside our
skull or you know whether there's some
type of quantum interactions going on
her mind is an incredible has incredible
ability to output new information
in
in a universe that
you know somewhat stale of information
right um our our minds are and some
somewhat unique in that we can imagine
and perceive things that could never
ever have possibly naturally occurred
and yet we can make it happen we can
substantiate that with enough belief
that it's true and it can happen
and so for me
i feel like i just need to encourage
that to encourage you know interaction
with reality such that it leads us to
newer and grander you know interactions
with this universe
and all that starts with a little bit of
curiosity exactly
right you're an incredible person uh
you've done so many things and there's
so much still
still ahead of you thank you for being
brave enough to talk about ufos
um and doing it so seriously and thank
you for pushing forward on all these
fronts in terms of technology so from um
just the fighter jets the the
engineering of that
to the aiml applications in the combat
setting that's super interesting and
then now quantum
i can't wait to see to see what you do
next thank you so much for sitting down
and talking today it was an honor it was
my pleasure thank you lex
thanks for listening to this
conversation with lieutenant ryan graves
to support this podcast please check out
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and now let me leave you with some words
from buzz aldrin
bravery comes along as a gradual
accumulation of discipline
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you