On a clear, sunny day in April 2014, two F/A-18s took off for an air combat training mission off the coast of Virginia. The jets, part of my Navy fighter squadron, climbed to an altitude of 12,000 and steered towards Warning Area W-72, an exclusive block of airspace ten miles east of Virginia Beach. All traffic into the training area goes through a single GPS point at a set altitude — almost like a doorway into a massive room where military jets can operate without running into other aircraft. Just at the moment the two jets crossed the threshold, one of the pilots saw a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere — motionless against the wind, fixed directly at the entry point. The jets, only 100 feet apart, zipped past the object on either side. The pilots had come so dangerously close to something they couldn’t identify that they terminated the training mission immediately and returned to base.”
I love retirement parties. They are a lot of fun. Laughter, fond remembrances, festive music, jokes, cake, time away from the cubicle. What’s not to like? I remember when I retired from the Air Force. I could say anything I wanted. My boss Major General David Forgan had just awarded me two medals moments earlier and his arm was on my shoulder as I stepped to the podium. Every officer and enlisted person in the room had their eyes on me, waiting for some pearls of wisdom, which I am generally ill-suited to offer. I could probably have said anything I wanted at that moment, like “Go Navy!” or tell my favorite jokes and not get court-martialed and lose my job. So, usually the retiree has a good deal of lattitude, which is another reason people look forward to retirement. The closer one gets to retirement, the more unpredictable they are and the more entertaining they become.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, a bonafide scientist and the current director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) at the Pentagon is retiring after twenty-seven years of work for the intelligence and defense communities. His most recent job was to sift through reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP.) You might expect that most encounters of what were one time called “unidentified flying objects” have quite common explanations, such as weather balloons, hoaxes, ordinary and top secret aircraft and so on. If this is what you expected, your were correct in your expectations. But after ruling out the prosaic, we’re left with hundreds of objects from the past two years alone that defy explanation. And the rate that new cases are crossing his desk is growing. A possible explanation for this has to do with new, advanced radar and other electronic systems being installed in our military aircraft and sea craft as well. It may be these objects were there all along but were overlooked until the current generation of radar came on line and pointed them out. Forty-seven percent of these mysterious objects are described as globe-shaped or spheres, and they are being noted more and more by our Navy pilots, civilian pilots, Reapers and other unmanned aerial vehicles.
Illustration credit: Darren Whittingham (Shutterstock.)
So, Dr. Kirkpatrick has just recently remarked according to The Hill that there are two explanations for the hundreds of unsolved cases in his office. One is they come from some other country that has craft that can fly four or times faster than our jets, turn on a dime, climb or descend a thousand feet a second or so, dive under the surface of the ocean or hover perfectly stationary in hurricane force winds. The other explanation he has is “aliens.” It is either one or the other. Either one of these two conclusions would be scandalous if true and make headlines around the world. But here’s the rub . . . Dr. Kirkpatrick mentions that, by the way, none of these objects “have been positively attributed to foreign activities.” Put differently, it’s like a city that has people turning up missing daily, and they launch an investigation. After a long, thorough inquiry, the chief investigator says that people in the city are either being snatched by zombies or they are being eaten a giant cockroach. That being said, the public is informed that there is no proof that cockroaches are involved. Voilà!
Was this just a careless slip of the tongue or a Freudian slip instead? Dr. Kirkpatrick recently co-authored a professional paper with Dr. Avi Loeb of Harvard University who also studies UAP, but from a different approach.
I have several posts on this blog about UAP. You can locate them here, here and here.
