User:Gtoffoletto/UFOSources

= Sources for UFO pages regarding USS Theodore Roosevelt January 21, 2015 and USS Nimitz November 14, 2004 UFO Encounters / AATIP = This page is a collection of sources destined to be used for an upcoming page. This is NOT part of the wikipedia encyclopedia (yet?).

List of sources + main claims
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html

“These things would be out there all day,” Lt. Ryan Graves said. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.

But the objects have gotten the attention of the Navy, which earlier this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.

Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said the new guidance was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents.

Lieutenant Graves still cannot explain what he saw. In the summer of 2014, he and Lt. Danny Accoin, another Super Hornet pilot, were part of a squadron, the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Va., that was training for a deployment to the Persian Gulf.

Lieutenants Graves and Accoin spoke on the record to The Times about the objects. Three other pilots in the squadron also spoke to The Times about the objects but declined to be named.

Lieutenants Graves and Accoin, along with former American intelligence officials, appear in a six-part History Channel series, “Unidentified: Inside America’s U.F.O. Investigation,” to air beginning Friday. The Times conducted separate interviews with key participants.

He said he was stunned to hear the pilot’s words. “I almost hit one of those things,” the pilot told Lieutenant Graves.

The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit. It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube.

The incident so spooked the squadron that an aviation flight safety report was filed, Lieutenant Graves said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNnvcZmfV5k Unidentified: UFO Testimony from LT. Ryan Graves (Season 1) | History

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7bqtik

Lt. Ryan Graves and Lt. Danny Aucoin. 10:42 '''50-60 navy personnel have observed the objects. Many more details'''

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ufo-sightings-pentagon-us-navy-congress-senators-oceana-a8968256.html

The Pentagon has provided a classified briefing to members of Congressabout reported encounters by US navy pilots and unidentified aircraft, some of which were said to have no visible engines and could reach hypersonic speeds.

Earlier this year, a number of pilots reported seeing the objects on an almost daily basis from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, while flying navy jets off the East Coast. Some of the encounters were even captured on video, leading the navy to announce it had updated the way pilots were to formally reports the incidents.

Now, the military has provided a classified briefings on the encounters to a group of senators, after the president said last week he had been updated on the issue.

Navy officials did indeed meet with interested congressional members and staffers on Wednesday to provide a classified brief on efforts to understand and identify these threats to the safety and security of our aviators,” the navy said in a statement, of the briefings that took place on Capitol Hill on Wednesday and Thursday.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28453/navy-f-a-18-pilot-shares-new-details-about-ufo-encounters-during-middle-east-deployment

Encounters continued after training

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/19/warner-classified-briefing-ufos-1544273

Three more U.S. senators received a classified Pentagon briefing on Wednesday about a series of reported encounters by the Navy with unidentified aircraft, according to congressional and military officials — part of a growing number of requests from members of key oversight committees.

“Navy officials did indeed meet with interested congressional members and staffers on Wednesday to provide a classified brief on efforts to understand and identify these threats to the safety and security of our aviators," spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Daniel Day said in a statement.



https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/444422-friend-foe-or-unknown-force-flying-overhead-congress-should-find

Since 2015, dozens of Navy F-18 fighter jets have encountered unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAPs) — once commonly referred to as UFOs — off the East Coast of the United States, some not far from the nation’s capital. Encounters have been reported by other military aircraft and civilian airliners elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad, too, including videos shot by airline passengers.

What these UAPs were and who was flying them — whether friends, foes or unknown forces — remains a mystery. Yet careful examination of the data inevitably leads to one possible, disturbing conclusion: A potential adversary of the United States has mastered technologies we do not yet understand to achieve capabilities we cannot yet match.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a30538203/navy-ufo-video-investigation/

In a statement to Popular Mechanics, Susan Gough, the Senior Strategic Planner for the Secretary of Defense Public Affairs Office, confirmed the authenticity of the video uploaded to Vision Unlimited, saying Navy officials became aware that the video had been posted online in 2009.

“With respect to the 2004 sighting by aircraft from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68); that video was widely shared throughout the ship at that time,” Gough writes. “In 2007, one of those crewmembers posted the video onto the public web.”

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a30916275/government-secret-ufo-program-investigation/

Now, after two years of scant details and a myriad of contradictory statements, Popular Mechanics is ripping open the U.S. government’s massive UFO problem. What follows is a deep, unprecedented well of information that’s only been known by a very small select group of insiders—until now.

Last year, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists obtained via FOIA request and published a January 2018 letter that the DIA Congressional Relations Division sent to members of Congress. In the letter, the DIA provided “a list of all products produced under the AATIP contract for the DIA to publish.” The referenced list includes 38 technical papers, called Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs), which cover a range of advanced, exotic, and theoretical aerospace topics.

Instead of investigating if UAP are real, the 38 technical papers for the AAWSAP contract were also an intelligence assessment to measure just how far advanced UAP could be from current and projected scientific understandings. “Me, Hal [Puthoff], and an aerospace executive who had access to materials worked on that assessment for the DIA,” Davis says.

Ultimately, aside from the wealth of BAASS proprietary evidence, Green’s study alone—which the DIA told Congress was a product of AATIP that it would “be happy to provide upon direct request”—seems to completely dispute the Pentagon’s recent claims that neither AATIP or AAWSAP were related to UFOs.

In June 2019, the Office of Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s office, confirmed that closed door meetings on UAP have occured. More recently, last December, when asked by Conway Daily Sun reporter Daymond Steer about the Navy UAP encounters, recent presidential candidate and current member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Michael Bennet, was cautious in saying he wouldn’t share anything he’d learned on the Intelligence Committee. However, Bennet said, “Our guys are seeing stuff that’s unidentified. They don’t know what it is, I don’t know what it is … We’re trying to learn more about it. The Air Force is trying to learn more about it.”

Insiders also say this past year, during a closed-door meeting with the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brigadier General Richard Stapp, Director of the DoD Special Access Program Central Office, testified the mysterious objects being encountered by the military were not related to secret U.S. technology. The Pentagon did not respond to requests by Popular Mechanics to confirm Stapp’s testimony before the Intelligence Committee.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/navy-confirms-videos-did-capture-ufo-sightings-it-calls-them-n1056201

Three videos posted online that have been described as being related to UFO sightings do indeed include footage of “unidentified aerial phenomena,” a U.S. Navy spokesman confirmed.

But as for specifics, spokesman Joseph Gradisher said the Navy doesn't know exactly what the objects are.

"The three videos (one from 2004 and two from 2015) show incursions into our military training ranges by unidentified aerial phenomena," Gradisher told NBC News in an emailed statement.

"The Navy has characterized the observed phenomena as unidentified," he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2019/09/18/those-ufo-videos-are-real-navy-says-please-stop-saying-ufo/

This year, the Navy overhauled its guidelines for reporting these UAPs to encourage pilots to flag disturbances

Last week, a Navy official publicly called these mysterious objects “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP),”

https://time.com/5680192/navy-confirms-ufo-videos-real/

Joseph Gradisher, the spokesman for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, confirmed to TIME that three widely-shared videos captured “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.”

(source conflates gimbal with flir)

2017 https://abcnews.go.com/US/navy-pilot-recalls-encounter-ufo-unlike/story?id=51856514

https://time.com/5070962/navy-pilot-ufo-california-not-from-this-world/

“I can tell you, I think it was not from this world,” Fravor told ABC News, also on Monday. “I’m not crazy, haven’t been drinking. It was — after 18 years of flying, I’ve seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close.”

 https://www.foxnews.com/science/navy-ufo-mystery-deepens 

The first video of the unidentified object was taken on Nov. 14, 2004, and shot by the F-18's gun camera. The second video was taken on Jan. 21, 2015, and shows another aerial vehicle with pilots commenting on how strange it is. The third video was also taken on Jan. 21, 2015, but it is unclear whether the third video was of the same object or a different one.

 https://www.foxnews.com/science/new-guidelines-on-ufo-reports-not-to-be-released-to-public-navy 

A Navy spokesman told The Washington Post that the reporting on UFOs would fall under "privileged and classified information" so that military aviation safety organizations can “preserve the free and honest prioritization and discussion of safety among aircrew.”

 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/23/us-navy-guidelines-reporting-ufos-1375290 

"There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. "For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.

"As part of this effort," it added, "the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/06/navy-withholding-ufo-sightings-1698396 

Navy Undersecretary Thomas Modly responded in a brief letter on July 31 that "the Department of the Navy takes these reports very seriously and continues to log sightings and fully investigate the accounts," according to a copy provided to POLITICO.

Among the revelations were sightings reported by pilots and other personnel assigned to the USS Nimitz and the USS Theodore Roosevelt battlegroups in 2004, 2015 and 2016, including footage of unknown aircraft exhibiting characteristics that appear to defy known aerodynamic properties.

https://www.airspacemag.com/space/year-ufos-180973965/

 https://fas.org/irp/dia/aatip-list.pdf 

AATIP FOIA

The Pentagon also financed a series of theoretical studies to try to explain how the aircraft might operate — ranging from "Detection and High Resolution Tracking of Vehicles at Hypersonic Velocities" to "Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions."

 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/16/pentagon-ufo-search-harry-reid-216111 

Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White confirmed to POLITICO that the program existed and was run by Elizondo. But she could not say how long he was in charge of it and declined to answer detailed questions about the office or its work, citing concerns about the closely held nature of the program.

https://www.history.com/news/navy-confirms-ufo-videos-real

U.S. Navy pilot Lieutenant Ryan Graves going on the record with his firsthand account of a UFO sighting while flying training missions over the Atlantic ocean

The news that the Navy considers the three videos—unofficially known as “FLIR1,” “Gimbal” and “GoFast”—as examples of UAPs first appeared on The Black Vault, a web site that specializes in declassified government documents. “FLIR1” is from November 14, 2004, and “Gimbal” and “GoFast” are from January 21, 2015. Joseph Gradisher, official spokesperson for the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, emphasized to HISTORY that these videos represent only some of the UAP sightings the Navy is investigating.

Nick Pope, who worked for the U.K. Ministry of Defense’s UFO program from 1991 to 1994, has previously speculated that there are four possible explanations for the more recent UAPs identified by the U.S. Navy: errors in pilot or computer perception, a secret U.S. project being blind tested without the Navy’s knowledge, a foreign government’s aircraft or something completely unknown.

“What I think the Navy’s recent statement does, is it probably takes off the table the first of those explanations,” he says. “I think the clear perception is the Navy thinks we’re dealing with something real and tangible here. So not misidentifications, misperceptions, glitches or such.”

USS NIMITZ

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a29771548/navy-ufo-witnesses-tell-truth/

Petty Officer 3rd Class Gary Voorhis

Operations Specialist Senior Chief Kevin Day

Ryan Weigelt, former Leading Petty Officer and power plant specialist for the SH-60B “Seahawk” helicopter

Lt. Chad Underwood would successfully capture video of the “Anomalous Aerial Vehicle,” or “AAV.”

Petty Officer 3rd Class Jason Turner

Petty Officer Patrick “PJ” Hughes

The most shocking claim these Navy veterans make is in what they say happened with all the data tapes for the various systems that recorded these UFO events.

Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton “What really made this incident alarming was when a Blackhawk helicopter landed on our ship and took all our information from the top secret rooms,” the witness says. “We were all pretty shocked and it was an unspoken rule not to talk about it because we had secret clearances and didn’t want to jeopardize our careers.”

Since none of the witnesses or pilots involved say they were ever interviewed at the time, it appears the most significant concern for the witnesses was the ship’s electronics data. What this data reveals, however, remains a mystery.

Kevin day no profit
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a29628228/military-nasa-veterans-form-ufo-group/

A new nonprofit will explore what the U.S Navy calls “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs)

The nonprofit is registered to a man named Kevin Day, a former U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer and radar operator whose time in service has influenced his new organization. While serving in the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group on the USS Princeton in 2004, Day experienced the “Nimitz UFO Incident,” which concerned a "whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego," according to a 2017 New York Times report.

Day is focused on UAPs occurring along the Pacific Coast, it seems. A company white paper that Motherboard obtained asks if "fleets of UAP 'migrate' from Catalina Island to Guadalupe Island with a certain frequency," and if so, "how well do whale songs correlate, if at all, to UAP appearances?”

Dr. Kevin Knuth, a former scientist from NASA’s Ames Research Center, current associate physics professor at the University of Albany, and key member of UAP eXpeditions.

lead author of a paper that examines "a handful of well-documented encounters, including the 2004 encounters with the NimitzCarrier Group off the coast of California."

flight patterns of these UAP sightings and determine that the "observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel. That is, if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space, then these craft could easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and cover interstellar distances in a matter of days to weeks, proper time."

“The failure to study these phenomena scientifically has resulted in a state of ignorance, which is unacceptable considering the aviation safety issues that have been reported by the U.S. Navy,” Knuth tells Motherboard.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjw3q5/this-silicon-valley-startup-is-dedicated-to-detecting-ufos-off-the-california-cost

He recalls tracking the infamous “Tic Tac” UFOs for several days around Catalina Island off the coast of California using the USS Princeton’s advanced radar system. Now, he believes that these objects continue to operate along the same trajectory and “migrate” from Catalina Island south along the California coast.

The company’s white paper is pretty wild. It asks, “Do fleets of UAP 'migrate' from Catalina Island to Guadalupe Island with a certain frequency? And if so, how well do whale songs correlate, if at all, to UAP appearances?” It’s unclear how whale songs are relevant here, but let’s move along.

KNAPP documents
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/i-team-exclusive-confidential-report-analyzes-tic-tac-ufo-incidents/1187688105/

Origin of to the stars: government disinformation?
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28377/tom-delonges-origin-story-for-to-the-stars-academy-describes-a-government-info-operation

SCU
https://www.explorescu.org/aapc-info

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSsi1OMW1LFzDru8IPRBw2K5OrbZbxniKtvaGaneGi_Iug1uh-JS4rDMh93PzET_gUP5MSVr1XV5hoj/pubhtml

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a29875104/ufo-research-evolution/