This interview was conducted online between myself, Dave C Beaty, and a US navy vet and a witness to the Nimitz UFO event. It was conducted in Jan of 2020. The witness is former USN CTO3 Cryptologic Technician – Operations, who was stationed on USS Princeton in Nov 2004 working in the Ship’s Signal Exploitation Space. Cryptologic Technician duties include providing telecommunications support to the fleet, information processing, controlling and operating communications systems and networks including satellite systems, network servers, and communications security devices. They hold a Top Secret clearance.

Key Points:

•He was shown a UAP radar track on the SPS-49 and AEGIS system Nov 2004.
•Reports a debriefing on the USS Nimitz about the UFO with an Ice Crystals story cover-up from top brass.
•He saw a UFO topside with a triangular formation of lights three nights in a row.
•Reports a boatswain’s mate who logged sighting of UFO’s in the USS Princeton logbook had his entry erased.
•Received an email on the SIPRnet about the “Ice Crystals” cover story with the FLIR1 video attached.
•Does not believe Cdr Fravor’s story.

DB: I appreciate you speaking with me today. Jason Turner has taken a lot of flak from people about what he saw in SSES the Ship Signal Exploitation Space. I am not interested in anything classified – just about the Tic Tac UAP event and anything you remember. Aside from what you see in my YouTube film I had someone say there was a briefing after the workups at Sims Hall on the San Diego Navy Antisubmarine Warfare base where it was also discussed. But no one I know, aside from the AT from the E2 squadron, was ever told not to speak about it.

CTO3 : My knowledge of the events starts and stops out on the training workup. I don’t doubt there have been a briefing on it later, somewhere, but I never knew about nor am I aware that anyone in my immediate chain of command was privy to it. If anything the two people most likely to have attended from the Princeton would have been the CO and the OPS officer as they had more direct involvement with the systems and events surrounding it as they were understandably front and center in the training exercise before it all went down. That aside, I discussed the situation with Jason Turner to see about clarifying anything I saw or had that contradicted his recollection. We discussed at length the length of the video. And we realized that we saw our videos at separate times.

DB: Sure, glad to have your input on this.

CTO3 : So Turner states that the video he saw was the day of the first and second contact. 1st contact was CDR. Fravor’s flight followed about an hour or so after that led to the 2nd contact and the FLIR footage. The video I saw was after the encounters and the briefing on the Nimitz. My shifts were all late night if I’m remembering correctly, but it’s surprisingly difficult to recall the time of day when you’re inside a ship 24/7. Turner saw the video on an unclassified computer and believed there to be about 7 minutes of video. I saw the video that you see online now, without all the editing. It ran somewhere between 1:15 and 2:00 minutes. My video WAS better clarity, but that’s not as impactful as some hope because it was still a rough-looking image even then. FLIR imaging is more for helping glean identifying structures for more information and less for actual visuals. Case in point: thrusters, angles of exhaust, things you can’t see with the eye but cause a temperature difference, etc. You’re not going to get hyper defined shapes and angles even at it’s best. And definitely not from 20+ miles out. Anyway, I firmly believe that Turner’s video could have been 7 minutes long. I doubt, highly doubt, that the aircraft intercepted this thing and snapped ONLY 1-2 minutes of footage. There’s no way. There isn’t a video capture operation on the planet that starts recording during and stops during an event unless someone forgot or was under extreme duress. Your interviews didn’t start halfway through a sentence and stop during a question. The flight recording wouldn’t start AFTER contact and stop DURING contact. Not a chance.

 

 

DB: There is conjecture the 1:16 version of the video was the one on SIPRnet and email. Compressed down to small size. That’s what was shared around the ships. Maybe a 640 X 480 resolution version existed from CVIC (Carrier Intel Center) that was also the same but a bigger file. But it’s my understanding there was no way a real-time feed was possible in 2004. Only from a LAMPS helo’s FLIR. Not over a link from fighters. Is that your understanding?

CTO3 :: Agreed. It wasn’t live. That’s not how those work. They record to hardware that it is taken off post-mission. The pilot does see it, though.

DB: Lt Chad Underwood has said – he filmed it and he was the WSO – that he recorded it all. He said, “Fights On, Tapes On” that’s the thing. The 8mm videotapes on those jets (dual recorders) had 90+ minute recording times. So CVIC made a little edited part of it?

CTO3 : Yeah. That’s the way those work. They start in advance of contact if at all possible and shut it off well afterward. This is because there’s a host of information that can get gathered under replays and such leading into a contact that you’d never notice at the moment. And after contact, of course.

DB: Plus workload, you don’t want to have to remember to hit record in the heat of battle. You get those things going way before. And they want to see radar and visual, they can switch between all the DDI’s and radar display in the cockpit. Plus a HUD camera. I’m surprised he didn’t switch to one of those. Yes, I’ve said that the whole time – David Fravor, he said there was no longer video. But we know there was at one time. In CVIC they had the tape. The guy that leaked it in 2007 – he said he copied it – burned it to a USB stick or CD from SIPRnet. Also, he had a PowerPoint presentation he can’t find now. Something like that. This was from the user The Final Theory on the website Above Top Secret that first released the FLIR1 video publically.

CTO3: In the CMDR’s defense he might honestly never have known of a longer version. Or never remember one. Do you know who copied it? The guy that leaked it. Was he Nimitz or Princeton?

DB: The guy who may have leaked it on youtube from Abovetopsecret.com is a pseudonym, TheFinalTheory. I think he said he worked in CVIC on Nimitz. It was released on Strangeland.com around 2007, Youtube.com, and also on a german website. Today only the german site visionunlimited.com has an internet archive of the actual leak. The links to youtube and strangeland.com are MIA.

CTO3 That’s interesting to me because I made a copy and so I could review it on my own time. That’s why I’m absolutely, 100% positive that what you see now online is what I saw then. I watched that thing a lot and cross-referenced it with everything I could think of.

DB: shipmate Gary Voorhis said he tried to get it that week but by the time he got on the secret net it was gone. Deleted.

CTO3: Unfortunately I just forgot about it, if you can believe that. Time marches on, ship politics, changing times, and I didn’t even think about it until a month ago. We went through a retrofit sometime after so it is very possible it was formatted off that drive.

DB: Did you see the little legs on the bottom? Do you remember any obvious discerning features?

 

 

CTO3: I’m pretty confident I saw it outside at night flying around us for three days. But we’re talking night-night. Like no moon black. I saw lights of a configuration I didn’t recognize that traveled around with no accompanying sound.

DB: Do you remember Sean Cahill the Sgt At Arms? He saw configs of lights as well at night.

 

 

CTO3: If I saw his face I’d know. If he was on the ship then most likely. I know I wasn’t the only one. But I know it was only a few of us that would have seen it outside. Most of the crew were sleeping during my watch.

DB: Did you see radar contacts as well?

CTO3: Yes. Both on the AEGIS and the radar equipment our OS used to guide the pilot to the vector. I did not witness the guiding. The vector was still present afterward and was told, “That’s the thing we guided the pilot to last night.” Paraphrased of course. Correction, not last night. I get it confused because I was awake at night learning all this stuff. I only recently started to put the timetable together from others and my own experience. So I spent years thinking the contact happened at night.

DB: Right, your watch was at night after all the other stuff during the day happened. Understood, so you were getting the info later. You could watch a playback of the AEGIS as OS Kevin Day did. Or on the CEC system?

CTO3: On the AEGIS itself I was aware we were tracking it for some time before contact and saw those tracks on the AEGIS display.

DB: But the vector or track – those things went on day and at night I assume, so you saw them outside of the intercept Nov 14. during the day. Do you recall seeing anything physics-bending like movement? You didn’t see the track of the intercept, just the object still around later or another similar one. BTW Kevin claims there were numerous tracks over the week.

CTO3: Off to the side is another station that had a system that looked like your old movie radars. Green beam spinning in a circle revealing dots.

DB: In SSES or CIC?

CTO3: CIC. That station is manned by an OS who directs the pilot to contacts of interest.

 

 

DB: Got it, so there was a pulse doppler radar or air track radar in addition to the phased array? SPS-49 and the Tactical Intercept Controller or TIC handles LINK and guiding the pilots in CIC.

CTO3: Yeah. AEGIS is more of a macro forest for the trees kinda thing. That was more micro, individual trees within said forest. The OS that guided one of the pilots, at the time I wasn’t aware of two encounters, showed me a contact on it that night, I believe, after contact and told me that was what they when to go look into.

DB: You mentioned previously to me about a debriefing? Also, did you remember anyone coming aboard after the intercepts to take drives, like shown in my docu?

CTO3: If anyone took drives it wasn’t from my space and I do recall seeing faces I’d did not know HOWEVER there was a SEAL team within the battlegroup during training due to an unannounced visit by then-President Bush to Mexico and we were the closest launching platform in the event of an emergency egress.

DB: If it happened, as they say, it was during the day – right after the intercepts same day

CTO3: Yeah, it’s possible I was asleep.

DB: Here is a link to the navy released FLIR video. The DoD said these videos represent unidentified aerial phenomena or UAP. Does it look like the object you saw on deck?

CTO3: Okay, so I reviewed everything you sent me. The FLIR video I saw was definitely bigger; not by much. The clarity was better as I could easily make out all of the instrument readings on the display when I viewed it. Also, what I saw topside was much closer. It had running lights in a triangular pattern that made me originally think it was our aircraft, but it did not make any sound that I could hear above the ship, and you can absolutely hear those aircraft above the ship’s operational noise. I saw it for three nights in a row just meandering in the sky and moving around in a manner that wasn’t consistent with any aircraft I could think of. More like a helicopter, but just no discernible sound.

DB: It sounds like you got a much closer view than the other people on CG-59. Did any of your shipmates see it or have any idea what these were? After thinking about it after all these years do you lean towards some top-secret craft or something more unknown?

CTO3: leaven pretty heavy towards it being a test platform from the US of some kind. Of course, there is always the possibility that it could be extraterrestrial, but if that were the case you would be looking at a pretty binary conclusion and I am someone who prefers to do a lot of comparisons, cross checking, and analytical work. There are just a lot of very interesting inconsistencies in areas of the event. Specific parts of it do not match, but what does match leave many with zero doubt that it is extraterrestrial and that is far, far too convenient.

DB: I have never heard or read anything to lead me to believe it was ET – but just what it is, I’m clueless. The idea of people taking data and telling people to be quiet in some cases screams a test of some sort. The sort of EW projects spoofing radar and deploying drones to draw off fighters – it all seems like a good decoy system. People point out the non- Newtonian, reactionless movement but we don’t have hard evidence of that just witness memory. Did it break the laws of physics? UFOs make a good cover story for advanced tech.

CTO3: Another thing to remember is that many people said the same thing about defying laws of physics/nature/etc. when stealth technology was showcased and unveiled. The SR-71 Blackbird was ‘impossible’. And now people look back on it and go well of course it wasn’t a UFO. Like they knew all along.

DB Of course but mil tech is like 20-30 years ahead of civilian tech.

CTO3: Sort of. Mil-tech is more willing to combine weird concepts. And definitely explore extreme science for ideas. About the only thing time has really done is harden their ethics.

DB: How So?

CTO3: You go back to the 1940s and military/government science was all too willing to strap bombs to bats to drop on Japan knowing said bats would roost in the primarily wooden buildings of Japan at the time. Most of those buildings would have been civilian houses. And the thing is it worked.

DB I was in one of the Japanese towns firebombed in WWII last year – The US totally targeted civilians in wooden homes – old people, women and children since all the men were away fighting.

CTO3: The testing of bats confirmed that it would have been very, very effective, but we pulled it from live use to make room for the atomic bomb which brought its own level of ethical issues. Then in the 50s or 60s it was confirmed that the government sprayed a chemical over a town to experiment with the effects on the population. Hence the now widespread belief in Chemtrails. It doesn’t help that the government has put its foot in its mouth.

DB: Have you ever sketched the objects you saw? A diagram of position and movements? I bet you could make a really good diagram and sketch? Love to see it.

CTO3: I never drew it. It was so dark at night that I never saw anything that would have even given me a structure to try to assume, let alone draw.

DB: What about the arrangement of lights or was it just a single point of light with no shape?

 

 

CTO3: The light arrangement was in a triangle. The thing is the movements it did can all be done by racing drones right now. Granted not on that size.

DB: Kevin’s stance and the pilots are the navy would never test something like that without more C&C present and guys like Mr. Fravor would def know. But he could be in on it too, I suppose.

CTO3: Here’s where I have an issue with Fravor’s statements. I’ll just go down the list as best I can. #1: Fravor’s first contact. I did not know that we had two contacts with the UFO at the time, but what I realized after hearing Fravor’s statement is that something I was told and I had attributed to the video contact was Fravor’s video. The OS that guided the pilots told me that the pilots were unnerved by what they were intercepting. I always assumed that the video was from the same intercept. But I didn’t know that the video was from another pilot and it didn’t match the OS’s statement of ‘pilots’. This checks out and confirms, on what I know, that there were two contacts; Fravor and his wingman followed shortly after by Underwood and the video. However, here’s the inconsistencies I have with Fravor’s claims. He never recorded anything and the characteristics he gave the UFO do not match it’s behavior afterward. Underwood’s video was taken on a wing-mounted FLIR from 20+ miles out, so I get why there was no other video attempt; you can’t see anything that far away. Fravor claims to have seen it in person, visually, with his eyes. And you’re telling me that not one of those planes had recording software/hardware running? I mean anything: Audio, cockpit camera, nothing? If I recall correctly they have that on board for the sake of accident investigations, but suddenly they did not have it on during that encounter? No aircraft that I know of leaves without recording hardware on-board. It might not be FLIR, it might not be some advanced electronics pod, but they have basic cockpit hardware to run back a blackbox or audio capture, or something I’m sure.

DB: I have the flight manual for the F/A-18F. Multiple recorders, cameras, cockpit audio.

 

 

CTO3: Exactly. And NOT ONE was turned on during this? So what does this mean? It means Fravor’s claims to its behavior during that contact can only be confirmed from Fravor. Unless the wingman claims otherwise, that’s all we’ve got to go on. Fravor also bailed on your documentary and then suddenly started popping up on more well-known media outlets to tell his story.

DB: And his WSO who has not spoken – the wing woman did see it and CDR Slaight but not as close.

CTO3: So: 1st contact has only eye-witness testimony to behavior and characteristics and not a single pilot was utilizing cockpit recording hardware before or during. #2 Pilots claiming video length. No one in the history of video recording has ever started recording after an event started unless it is unexpected or a surprise. Movie producers roll cameras ahead of the actual scene and trim down, interviewers roll camera/audio capture ahead of time and trim down, the military begins recording ahead of time and well after the event so things can be reviewed later. I do not buy into the narrative that a pilot loads a FLIR with the express intent to find and identify an unknown vector and records only 1 minute and 15 seconds of video.

DB: Chad Underwood concurs with that.

CTO3: #3: Fravor’s statement of no cover-up. Fravor claims that there was no NDA, people just stopped talking about it, and that was that. No suits. I recall faces I did not recognize arriving on my ship and then being told within the same day that I was not to discuss what happened. A BM (Boatswain’s mates) on watch had recorded the event with the UFO in his watch log on the bridge. He was relieved by an officer early. He told me the next day that his watchlog was rewritten with any mention of the UFO gone and signed in his name, but none of it was his handwriting. And the biggest thing I have on Fravor. The thing I don’t understand. During the debriefing that was given everyone was told that the official statement was ‘falling ice refracting on the AEGIS causing the ghost tracks’. The email message I got with the video that I saw said that the official statement was falling ice and if asked that was what we were to tell people. But then the this is what was really going on video attachment. Why have none of the pilots mentioned falling ice? Even if just to make light of the attempted cover-up. Falling ice was the Nimitz’s upper chain’s idea. As far as I’m aware, of course

DB: Capt “Red” Smith told Kevin Day he thought it was spontaneously forming ice crystals. Do you think Nimitz had that too, from the admiral? Or their captain?

CTO3: There was a debriefing involving the Princeton’s OPS officer and my division’s LCPO and CWO who left to go to the Nimitz to discuss the event. When they returned we were told that one of the upper officers of the Nimitz, I can’t recall if it was the CPT. or ADM., said ‘falling ice’ to which the Air Boss replied, “With all due respect, sir, falling ice does not turn 90 degrees and accelerate to 600 mph.” Exact speed is paraphrased. But the point I’m trying to get across here is that there WAS a debriefing on the Nimitz with a cover story and Fravor mentions nothing. And you’re going to tell me that the commanding officer of the Black Aces wasn’t involved in that debriefing?

DB: Of course he was. Sounds like a cover story to me.

CTO3: Exactly. Now to my other point. In your typical government cover-up, you get excuses. You get ‘falling ice’ thrown around. What you don’t get is any information cover-upwithout some extreme teeth pulling. Or some ‘unknown source’. What we have is DEFINITIVELY real, but what we have conveniently points to extraterrestrial. We have a video that only showcases seemingly physics-defying movements that there are claims it was longer and immediately denouncement of that claim. We have pilots who saw it with their own eyes, claim it ‘blinked out of sight’, but were not recording anything at all. The video we have is 20+ km FLIR which will only confirm that it’s a thing, but no real defining features beyond that. We have ‘no cover up’ from the Nimitz and ‘yes cover up’ from the Princeton. If you wanted to hide something from the public, some test platform from the world, wouldn’t it be great if everyone just said aliens and then never believed any other claims otherwise because the evidence was slimmed down just enough to support the ‘alien’ context? To follow that and cap this off, here are the reasons I think it could have been a test platform. The Predator drone was created in the late 90s, so drone technology was a thing, but if you trace the time-line, drone/UAV tech really took off the next four years or so after the UFO event with the Nimitz and Princeton. Back then we never would have thought UAV, it wasn’t even a thing. Now Amazon wants them delivering packages. Typically speaking technology is hush hush for a few years in prototyping before it is opened to the public. I’ve got more. The JSF (Joint Strike Fighter) was in development at the time but heavily classified. I know this for a fact; I looked up everything my clearance let me when I was bored. Rail gun tech as well. Those riot control microwave lasers? Those were being prototyped and tested in 2004 too. But public knowledge didn’t happen until about 2007-2008. The JSF has/had three variants. One of them was VTOL capable. All of them had a profile to promote stealth. The UFO was confirmed, and I believe this, by Fravor to be actively jamming the aircraft from being able to get any instrumentation aside from FLIR. But to actively jam something you need to have an idea of what the sender is using. Because my stance on that was if it was being actively jammed the target would need to know what was trying to collect information.

DB: Fravor claims active jamming. Chad said he saw no signs of jamming that the radar couldn’t hack it – like it was stealthy low cross-section in the official report. Then he reversed his statement and now says he was actively jammed.

CTO3, You can’t universally jam something; that’s not a thing. Passive jamming then. Basically, the profile prevents solid instrumentation. Like why the Raptor shows up as a golf-ball instead of a big ass plane on radar.

DB: Correct but I think Fravor claims he saw active jamming.

CTO3: He does. He says it in Joe Rogan’s interview.

DB Yup

CTO3: Fravor is pushing this extraterrestrial narrative really hard. The behavior of the UFO (FLIR video) doesn’t match Fravor’s. Why did it not just ‘blink’ out of sight of Underwood like it did in Fravor’s encounter? And the other thing that makes me lean heavily into the test platform arena is what I saw. What I saw had running lights. I actually thought it was our helo or Nimitz aircraft at first sight because it was a triangle formation of lights very similar to the points of lights on the bottom of any other aircraft. But it didn’t make any sound I could hear over the ship’s operating sound which is why I knew it wasn’t ours. I’ve heard our aircraft and helos over the sound of the ship. Not hard at all.

DB: How far was it from you? Like how far would something be you can’t hear like a Helo?

CTO3: I can’t tell you an exact range, but I can tell you that with how clearly I saw those lights if it was any of those things I’d have heard it.

DB: If it was a predator drone would you think that profile would fit?

CTO3: I’d imagine a predator would be much quieter and it could have had the lights in the configuration I saw, but…the lights were different colors; similar to what you see on aircraft. And it was moving in a way that really wouldn’t be possible for something with forward propulsion like aircraft. Like it’s turns were not banking. It was ‘sliding’ Or at least gave the appearance of it. Like how home UAVs can do now. Where they go lateral and back-forth.

DB: Do you think I could animate it? (CGI)

CTO3: I couldn’t tell you how accurate it’d be. I mean 16 years is a long time. But my last and final point for why I support a test platform theory.

DB: What type of propulsion can do that? What you personally saw?

CTO3: Well, right now, rotors. It’s a behavior expected and seen in helicopters. Clean movement, lateral shifts, ‘gliding’ motion. The UAVs nowadays utilize four blades to pull off much of that.

DB: Like a multi-rotor craft – electric or nuke motor?

CTO3: Yeah, rotor would do it. But the thing that stuck out was the lack of sound. I know they were actively prototyping the JSF and one of the variants was VTOL. They were having difficulty with the VTOL and they also wanted stealth capabilities of some degree on the aircraft. The idea of testing a new VTOL system on a remote manned platform so you aren’t driving your expensive toy into the dirt isn’t out of the realm of possibility. And if you wanted to test sound and passive stealth capabilities what better way to do that then on your own technology? But why the Nimitz and Princeton? Well, we were simulating a battle-ready status. And if you want to hide something like that what better plausible deniability could you have than two ships whose systems are rigged to pretend their somewhere else in the world with false location data and tracks? You just say, “Oh. Must have been a bug in the system.” And how did we handle it when the vectors first started appearing? What was our standard operating procedure when we got unknown tracks that didn’t match our faked data for training? “Oh. It’s just a bug in the system.” For two weeks we deleted the tracks believing they were false positives. We even shut down and rebooted the AEGIS. You don’t get much more plausible with deniability then that.

DB: And then send people over to grab tapes with all tracks, comms and scrub anything else left from AEGIS and CEC and ESM. Who else had the CEC system in the battle group besides Princeton? VAW-117 Hawkeyes.

CTO3: People will always believe an officer over an enlisted guy. And definitely a pilot over non-pilot. I know Fravor’s story doesn’t match. And I know only one ship had the AEGIS system. The Princeton. And only one ship had everything supposedly taken. The Princeton. In fact it wouldn’t even surprise me if the Nimitz squadron was actually aware of a testing platform. But the only reason it got to this point was that the Princeton picked it up and that wasn’t part of the plan.

DB: Why would navy and DoD allow the pilots to talk and bring in NYT and the media with the story in Dec 2017? Why not let it instead fade away. Instead, Fravor is thrust into the spotlight on every major news outlet in the world that week. If it was a secret test you’d think they would rather not have it scrutinized.

CTO3: That’s just it. People are so willing to buy into the UFO narrative and they’ll ignore any other explanation. Look at the comments in the videos with Fravor. “He’s a pilot! I trust the pilot saw an alien!” “If he says it’s real, it’s real!” etc. If you want to hide something make me look the other way. Now there’s always the possibility that, sure, it was extraterrestrial, but that line of thought lives and dies right there. You just immediately dismiss everything else that happened and that is why I have a problem with this. Why deny a longer video, why deny there was a cover-up, and why the conflict with the jamming? Why? If it was extraterrestrial and you were willing to say it was, why conflict anywhere? What doesn’t make sense to me is how willing key people are to say it isn’t human or had conventional characteristics and yet immediately dismiss/deny anything that could ever point in the other direction. A longer video would confirm more of its behavior doesn’t exist. A cover-up would confirm that there was more to the story doesn’t exist. That isn’t behavior consistent with someone who wants you to know the truth. That’s behavior consistent with someone who wants you to believe the truth. ‘The truth’ and the thing is I don’t care what it was. Aliens, VTOL drone, UAV looking for sentience to replace our pilots, I don’t care. I CARE about my shipmates being called out. I CARE that some pilot is going around denouncing anyone that isn’t an officer or part of his squadron for no other reason than ‘I was a pilot; I’m better.’

 

DB: One of the strongest parts is I have four people independently saying they personally saw non-navy people that boarded the ships and retrieved data and left soon after the vectors , as you call them, the intercepts with all evidence. Because they wanted to see how their new platform performed against a battle-ready strike group, RCS jamming and stealth, and electronic signature? That fits way more than they came to see the UFO because they study them at Area 51 next to Bob Lazar’s AG spacecraft.

CTO3: Yeah. I’m not keen on letting my shipmates take the fall for some publicity.

 

Former enlisted US navy vets statements about the Nimitz UFO event were denounced by Cdr. David Fravor on various media outlets publicly, including Joe Rogan’s national radio show

 

DB: I emailed another former navy F/A-18 fighter pilot, Vincent Aiello and he concurs they should have been recording. He said it’s SOP. And the FLIR video doesn’t show hypersonic movement, in his opinion. I think if they didn’t record it would be a screw-up on the pilot’s part. So can we conclude two jets that saw it messed up and forgot to record? And the one that had it on radar and FLIR also screwed up and forgot to record most of the intercept? Also regarding the debrief on Nimitz. Do you recall when this took place? Nov 14th was the intercept. Around Nov 20 the ship docks at the pier.

CTO3: Debrief was immediately following the intercept that resulted in the video. What I do not know is if it was the day after or not, but chronologically it occurred immediately following the FLIR capture and before we reached port. I want to say it was the day of because I recall seeing an unidentifiable aerial object for three nights in a row. And I recall those sightings occurred with the knowledge that I ‘knew’ what I was looking at. In that, I looked up and told myself, “That’s probably the thing.”

DB: Well if I get a detailed description I can probably animate what you recall, and have you adjust it so it more or less mimics the lights.

CTO3, Unfortunately, I could not give you anything besides the configuration of the lights. It was so dark those nights that I couldn’t see any structure at all.

DB: Another shipmate that worked in CIC on ECCM said it’s unlikely that non-clearance people had permission to enter SSES – that only about 10 people on the ship could go in and not even the XO had access. Did you know Jason or have any reason to doubt his story of being in SSES?
Jason said he could go in there to deliver parts from ships stores.

CTO3 Yeah, correct. He had the clearance to enter on a case by case basis. Standards procedure was to blackout the monitors in the room for those without need to know. However, in his statement and after speaking with him, he says he saw the video on our unclassified computer which would not have been blacked out. I don’t have reason to doubt what he claims, but I also don’t have enough information to completely confirm it word for word. I don’t know why someone would leave the video up on an unclassified computer or who it could have been that gave him access as he did not have the code to enter so he would have had to have one of us open the space for him.

DB: The thing that critics always throw up is the 24,000 mph track on AEGIS. Kevin has never wavered on his claim these objects went down in .78 secs. From 28,000 feet. But there is no tangible proof of that. Only a witness statement. Only he saw the playback the next day.

CTO3, People are acting like the AEGIS is infallible. There’s a reason procedures exist to correct ghost tracks; the AEGIS makes mistakes. When I spoke to the CIC officer on watch and learned of the tracking, I was told simply that it was seen in several locations on the system. The distance and time of appearance from track to track suggest it would have to be moving far faster than anything or an exercise was simulating or anything conventional that we could assume. I saw the AEGIS display and the track in question. It was only one track pointed out to me. The rest I assumed were tracks for the exercise. Had there been more than one concurrent suspicious track I’d have been told ‘all of these’ not ‘that one’.

DB: The comments from Kevin Day are that they had multiple tracks days before the intercept and at that time they’d show up as 5-10 in a formation going south. But other accounts say one or two objects were spotted, including the day of the intercept.

CTO3, Definitely cannot vouch for that statement. I never heard anything about multiples. Only multiples in reference to ‘ghost track keeps appearing multiple times’. Every single person I spoke to that was involved to some degree only referred to it as a singular. That includes my LCPO and DIVO.

DB: Thank you for coming forward, and speaking with me. With each new witness, new opinions, observations, and inside information helps to further illuminate this case. I encourage your shipmates to speak up if they witnessed this event in any way. The more voices that are added to the testimony, the more vindication for your shipmates. This is not a one person story as many would like to believe, or a pilot’s only story. The enlisted navy vets who were on the deck and manning the radars and there that day have a story as well. And for history this is just as important. Do you mind if I share this story, without your identification, I will not use your name?

CTO3:I have no problems with you sharing this.