The USS Nimitz UFO incident - Radar targets
Two years ago, I made a post about the Nimitz UFO incident where I compared how some details differ between the reports and witness interviews. I made one significant omission. I left out the accounts given by Princeton radar operators. I noted then that:
Those accounts severely contradict all the other primary sources and contain a number of not too credible additions, e.g. multiple other intercepts and a supposed high quality video of a flying saucer.
Given those accounts also lack evidence and supportive statements by the primary witnesses, I won't consider them further here.
Five months later Kevin Day himself left a comment where he stated:
Don't discount the radar operators in your analysis --- right now, you look pretty silly from my perspective. Otherwise, great report and your skepticism is, as always, justified.
(See the comments section for our full exchange.)
Given that I just posted my "best guess" theory about the incident, and promised to add some details later, I thought it would be a good time to start with the radar contacts.
Horizontal, or vertical, that is the question
So here's the first problem. The reports and statements describe two vastly different kinds of radar contacts, and the connection between them, if there is any, is far from clear. Since there's no publicly available radar data, we have to rely on witness statements. The primary source is Senior Chief Operations Specialist Kevin Day, who has described what he saw on the radar over the period of several days, including the day of the visual tic-tac encounter.
So what exactly did he see? Let's start with the Nimitz Encounters documentary, where he tells us that himself:
Some excerpts:
I was on watch and we were probably 100 miles, I forget how far exactly that day we were off the coast of San Diego, south southwest. Kind of off the coast of Mexico, Baja. And I started to notice, these weird tracks that were popping under my radar coverage right around San Clemente island. And the reason why I say there are weird because they were appearing in groups of five to 10 at a time and they were pretty closely spaced to each other. And they were 28,000 feet going a hundred knots tracking south.
Another watcher too as I'm watching the same formation appeared again and over the course of three, four days probably counted up to that point groups of five to 10 at a time, there were probably 50, 60 tracks by then.
So groups of objects going relatively slowly horizontally at high altitude.
But then there's this twist:
In some cases, they seem to descend from space, and then suddenly plunge to near sea level in seconds.
Well, that's quite different.
Going ballistic
Oddly enough, the Executive report only mentions the vertical movements:
The top of the scan volume would put the AAVs at higher than 60,000 feet. The AAVs would descend "very rapidly" from approximately 60,000 feet down to approximately 50 feet in a matter of seconds. They would then hover for a short time and depart at high velocities and at turn rates demonstrating an advanced acceleration (G) capability.
Since the radar was in the mode to handle Air Intercept of conventional aircraft it never obtained an accurate track of the AAVs and was quickly "dropped" by the radar meaning it was eliminated by the computer to reduce the amount of clutter on the radar, as any other false target is handler. If the radar were set up in a mode for Ballistic Missile tracking they likely would have had the capability to track the AAV. They were detected three separate times during the week operating off the western coast of the United States and Mexico.
So that "descend from space" seems to mean top of the scan volume, some 60,000 or 80,000 feet, depending on the source. 60,000 feet vertical movements to both directions in seconds sounds more like radar glitches than something physical, and that seems to be what the radar computer also opined.
It also begs the question how would they be able to see something like turn rates on their radar screens, especially if it never obtained an accurate track?Let's try another source, Mick West's interview of Kevin Day.
And for several days, I've been watching these weird contexts off the off the coast of Catalina Island. And the reason why I say they were weird, is because our Ballistic Missile Defense guys was tracking these things coming down from outer space, I found out later, that wasn't the view that I had on my radar, I was I'm more concerned with 30,000 feet and below. And then we go from 80,000 feet then suddenly dropped to 28,000 feet. And they were going south at about 100 knots, which is really weird for something that high in the sky to go that slow. What the hell flies like that I'd been sitting behind that radar for 18 years on three different ships behind this SPY-1 radar. I had never seen anything fly like that. And I was convinced it was sort of a glitch in the system. I was like, Hey, we need to run diagnostics, reload the systems.
So it seems the operators also believed there was some radar problems and that "from space" was second hand information at best. Since the Princeton SPY-1 radar wasn't in that ballistic missile tracking mode, who were those "Ballistic Missile Defense guys" and what radar were they using?
Mick West: So How did you find out about this ballistic missile defense
Kevin Day: In the next couple of days talking to the guys on the ships
So, what ships?
The Executive report informs us that in addition to USS Nimitz and USS Princeton, the carrier strike group included USS Chafee and USS Higgins. So maybe one of them? But the same document also tells us that:
The only participants in the events surrounding the detection and intercept of the AAV are the USS Princeton, VAW-117, VMFA-232, and VFA-41.
Furthermore the SCU "Forensic Analysis" obtained the logs for those ships and according to them, at least during the visual encounter:
The main purpose of the Chafee and Higgins Deck Logs was to establish that those ships were not in the area at the time of the event.
The USS Princeton was nearby while the USS Higgins was docked in San Diego and the USS Chafee was 1/3 of the way back on its journey from Pearl Harbor to the Southern California Operating Area. The location of the nuclear attack submarine, USS Louisville, is not known for the time period of November 10-14.
So the true source for the claims about ballistics trajectories or descending from space is very much unclear. Could be just some misunderstanding or false memory after all these years.
Ice crystals
The Executive Report contains another possible explanation for the radar targets:
The Meteorological Officer (METOC) onboard the Princeton provided a briefing that discussed a high altitude weather phenomena where ice crystals can form and be detected by the AN/SPY-1.
It doesn't state anything more about that, like if that officer thought that was likely explanation. But Kevin Day mentions the captain of USS Princeton seemed to believe so:
Kevin Day: I asked him "Hey sir, what do you think these things were?" You know what he told me? He said it was spontaneously forming ice from space. And I actually laughed at him.
The official finding was that it was spontaneous ice forming in the atmosphere.
He like Day didn't believe that explanation. But then again, if we want to believe in the expertise of people onboard those ships, the meteorological officer should be the expert on weather related things, and the radar was new/upgraded and in that regard not that familiar, and the radar operators themselves suspected those were false returns for one reason or another.
Too many mundane explanations
That's the problem. We have claims that beggars belief, their sources are unclear to say the least, and there are many possible mundane explanations to choose from.
Furthermore, Day makes it abundantly clear that what he had seen before Fravor had his visual encounter didn't make him consider anything too extraordinary:
I either thought it was some sort of a system error or something civilian related, like balloons. And they didn't even know we were down there. I wasn't even remotely thinking aliens just so you know. And at the time, I wasn't even thinking UFOs, it just wasn't what I was thinking.
I definitely wasn't thinking UFOs, trust me on that. That was Yeah, wasn't really my thought process at the time who I would have laughed back, if someone would have said that. I would have laughed.
The only reason why I convinced that Captain stood to intercept these things, was because I called the "safety of flight" thing on him. And that's really hard to argue with.
But we continue to monitor them and I, uh, on the day that commander David Fravor did his intercept, I'd probably already seen 60 of these things. You counted them all, they appeared in groups of five to ten at a time, and I thought it was some sort of system error until he intercepted one of them in..., at that moment I became convinced they were actually real objects. But what they were I don't know, I'm the same as you. I don't know.
If anyone had actually seen something as extraordinary as those extreme vertical speeds, or objects coming from space, I would expect them to think something else than "civilian related" reasons.
Update 2021-07-04: Day also told Alejandro Rojas in 2019 that:
I wasn't really concerned about it and no one on the watch team was concerned about them because you know there's hundreds of air contacts off the coast and these were still well away from us and they were benign in their behavior and represented absolutely no threat to the strike group at all and the only reason I became concerned about it in the end on the 14th is because we're getting ready to conduct an air defense exercise and there was a really good chance that these objects were gonna end up in the airspace we were ready to do the exercise in.
And:
If there had been no air defense exercise scheduled for that morning this whole thing probably would have never happened, at least by us.
Day also thought those were radar errors until the pilots saw the one tic-tac. Then he apparently became convinced all of them were real objects. Which seems like a hasty conclusion considering the pilots never reported extreme vertical movements, or really anything that would match the reported radar events.
I think those high altitude vertical movements are probably a later addition to the story, which may have originated from some radar glitches or something.
Fast turn rates
Mick West: You said that Fravor told you that it did a barrel roll around him?
Kevin Day: I wasn't able to see that on, I didn't see no barrel roll on my display. That was verbal, Yeah.
Chasing it down
Kevin Day: He chased it down and he left his wingman up high down and he chasing it down that when he was chasing it down that then reacted to him. And that's when he saw the disturbance in the water.
Mick West: Yeah, I think that, I must say, that's not exactly the the order in which he tells it now. Like he says he first saw the disturbance in the water. And then he saw the Tic Tac and then the Tic Tac came up rather than coming down.
Kevin Day: Well, he had chased it down here, but he may have saw the disturbance before he got it. He noticed the thing's darting around the top of the ocean. I think that's what he was trying to say. Yeah, but when he saw that object, that's why he was chasing it down when it dropped down to the surface of the ocean.
As soon as he got to the merge plot position, the object that he was intercepting dropped from 28,000 feet down to 50 feet above the water in 0.78 seconds as I found out later the next day.
Shooting back up?
Hovering?
To CAP and back?
To recap, all the available information regarding extreme vertical movements seems to be unreliable. None of it has any available evidence, witness statements are conflicting, and in many cases even the origins of the claims are unclear to say the least. They may be misinterpreted radar artifacts, misunderstandings between people making various observations, false memories, or fabrications.
Those vertical elements of the story also have a similar horizontal counterpart. When Fravor and others lost sight of the object, it was supposedly detected almost immediately at their CAP point, some 40-60nm away.
Kevin Day stated in his interview with Mick west that the object Fravor intercepted was the closest one of a group of several objects. And according to him, it didn't just move to the cap, but also back, joining the group:
Mick west: The object, when it moved to the CAP point. Did you did you see it actually move? Or did it just appear there?
Kevin Day: We saw it actually move. It went swoosh [moves hand rapidly]. In just several seconds? About 40 miles away.
Mick west: So you tracked that on the radar
Kevin Day: Yes
Mick west: From the, from Fravors position to the CAP point.
Kevin Day: Back to the CAP point, yes.
Mick west: After it got to the CAP points. Did you track it? Back to its, you know, group?
Kevin Day: Yes, it stayed on the CAP point for several seconds. And then it rejoined its original group.
Mick west: Okay.
Kevin Day: It kept going south, Back to 28,000 feet back to 100 knots and kept going south. And at that point, we call, we called off the exercise at that point.
So for some strange reason this one object is supposed to make an extremely fast jump to their specific CAP point, stay there for some seconds, and return back?
Poison [callsign of Princeton] initially reported that the "picture was clean" (no contact) but then stated "you're not going to believe this, its at your CAP", which was located to the southern end of the training area and had climbed to approximately 24,000 feet.
That indicates there wasn't continuous tracking, and it's much more likely they just temporarily mistook some other contact there as being the same object.
Update 2021-07-03: Fravor told Joe Rogan it moved 60 miles in maybe 30-40 seconds and that "they didn't track it, it just appeared. It just shows back in the radar." A year earlier he estimated to Linda Moulton Howe that it appeared there maybe in a couple of minutes but they never saw it on their radars and the cruiser also lost contact.
According to the Event log, the other participants of that exercise included two F/A-18C Hornets from VMFA-232 and one from VFA-94. They were probably circling their CAP at the time when the blue team was checking out the object, as contrary to what Day claimed, according to the Event log and statements given by Fravor, the exercise wasn't called of but instead Fravor and others did one exercise run before returning back to the Nimitz, so presumably their red team "enemies" had to be somewhere over there to have that exercise with them. Maybe they just temporarily mistook one of those other planes as the tic tac in the heat of the moment. The altitude of 24,000 feet is also a good match to where the planes tended to be, while the objects were normally reported higher at 28,000 feet.
Update 2021-07-04:Day told Alejandro Rojas that Fravor hadn't reached their CAP point yet before they were vectored. So that would indicate the CAPs I have drawn on the above map would be too much to the north, as they were drawn based on the understanding that Fravor had already reached their CAP when vectored, and the location given in the Navy Event Summary was their location when vectored (not that of the UFO). Which would make sense, since now the blue CAP is outside MISR-1W and their target area should have probably been MISR-1E, so maybe they were still going to turn towards MISR-1E but were vectored before it happened.
Under the surface?
Petty Officer Gary Voorhis in the CEC indicated that an underwater object was tracked at 500 knots. No additional confirmation confirming sonar contacts has been obtained.
The Executive report contains statements by USS Louisville commander and another officer who explicitly state that "there was no anomalous undersea activity during this period" and "there were no unidentifiable sonar contacts in the vicinity of the aerial sightings or at anytime during the operations off the coast of California".
That part of the story doesn't seem to be supported by anything.
When witnesses collide
Many people who really like to believe every word of these stories often ask others to just believe the witnesses. But here the question really is, which ones? While the said people seem to have incredible skills of closing their eyes from all contradictions, the fact is that this event is filled with contradicting statements. And not just that, Fravor has actually stated quite directly some of these statements are untrue, as Robert Sheaffer reports (I also saw the original video):
Fravor spoke at the recent UFO Fest in McMinnville, Oregon (held annually to honor the famous Trent UFO Photos, taken just outside that town). Reporter George Knapp and documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell were also on the panel. Fravor sharply criticized the accounts of certain other people who were involved and have been speaking about the incident. He seemed to be singling out the account of the radar operator, Kevin Day, as being non-factual. He dismissed claims of Air Force personnel coming on board the Nimitz and confiscating evidence as being untrue. Fravor also referred to Dave Beaty's "Nimitz UFO Encounters" documentary as a "cartoon." This prompted Knapp to say to Fravor, "I guess you're being diplomatic, but some of the stories and claims that have been made by people, who may have been on those ships, are just bullshit." When people began commenting about these remarkable disagreements, Corbell pulled the video off YouTube.
Whatever the reasons, when it comes to the radar parts of this story, there doesn't seem to be too much reliable information. Which is why I originally chose to mostly ignore it.
It should be also repeated that even Kevin Day himself, who was the primary witness looking at the radar, didn't consider all that he had seen that extraordinary or even necessarily real objects before the visual encounter and what the pilots reported. That makes it even more likely that the supposed extreme radar events were later reinterpretations and additions to the story.
The truthful core
All that being said, there's reason to believe there were some real radar contacts too. Something triggered the intercept, and it seems to have been the stuff that moved slowly and horizontally. It wasn't extreme enough to gain much headlines in later retellings. In fact it was pretty much the opposite, too slow to be regular planes, some 100 knots at 28,000 feet.
Depending on the interview, they have been described as appearing either close to Catalina Island or San Clemente Island or up in the Channel Islands area off to LA, moving south 100-120 knots at 28,000 feet (with some variance) and disappearing somewhere close or above Guadalupe Island, which belongs to Mexico. According to Day, they had a good track of them for a couple of hours at a time:
Mick West: And then they traveled from Catalina to Guadalupe, and they pass between your group, I guess, the Princeton and the mainland.So what's moving at 100 knots?
Kevin Day: That's correct, yes
Mick West: Alright, how long did it How long did you track one individual for?
Kevin Day: That's a good question. I can do the math in my head. It's 100 knots. It's probably, what is it, 250 miles, a couple of couple hours easily.
Mick West: Right. So you can see them the whole way from all the way from Catalina and yeah,
Kevin Day: you know, our when we get a contact, the system grades it on the quality on the radar. And I had the highest system track quality and contacts the entire time. The highest quality possible.
Winds
Here's a plot of the wind speeds and directions at an altitude of 28,000 feet during the period of November 7 (week before the visual encounter) to November 16 (a couple of days after it) from the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, San Diego (IATA code NKX), which is the closest weather station with upper wind data available.
The plot is based on data available from University of Wyoming. Measurements are made twice a day, in 12 hour intervals, presumably collected with weather balloons carrying radiosondes. The x-axis label 14@12Z for example means November 14 at 12:00 o'clock Zulu timezone (UTC+0). The data is provided from a number of specified altitudes, for some days exactly from 28,000 feet, and for others I interpolated data that was measured somewhat below and above that altitude.
The orange line shows the wind speed in knots, and the blue bars show the compass direction from which the wind is blowing in degrees. So anything close to the bottom (0 degrees) or the top (360) means the wind is blowing from north.
When we look at the data close to the time of the visual encounter, we can see the wind speed is very close to 100 knots and the direction is very close to north-south direction. It's pretty much as good a match as we could possibly hope for with the given descriptions. It's more or less a dead giveaway we are dealing with balloons.
There are some other days with pretty good matches too, although not as close. But since we don't know the exact times of the reported other radar events, and considering how inaccurate and conflicting the descriptions otherwise are, it's hard to make conclusions about them. It should be also noted that while this weather station is relatively close to the location, there's still quite some distance and difference between winds inland vs. at sea. But in any case this data shows that there are winds within that region that can fit the described movements.
Location, location, location
The specified locations for the appearance and disappearance of the objects happen to correspond closely to the northern and southern limits of the navy training area. And San Clemente Island as the potential starting point is a navy base.
If they wanted to launch some balloons, that would be a very good place to do it. Or perhaps from some boat close to it (or Catalina Island). And if they didn't want their stuff to end up to someone's lawn in Mexico, it would make sense to have them self-destruct upon hitting the training area limits at the other end.
It should be noted though that since its unclear how the targets originally appeared on the radar, they could have also floated further away from the north and were just picked as targets of interest at that point.
Furthermore, if they wanted to avoid the risk of colliding with the jets within the area, picking an altitude 3,000 feet (or 30 flight levels) above to what the fighters normally use would be a good choice.
The targets have been said to have always come from the same location, near San Clemente or Catalina Island, but there's contradicting information where the visual encounter actually happened, and the most likely position is not there, or on the line south from there, although not necessarily too far off from it. Was the location different in that instance?
I have plotted the possible locations according to various sources on the map shown before (alternatives marked with "UFO"). The written report (PR) by Alex Dietrich states they flew east "towards San Clemente Island", and her WSO Jim Slaight also stated in his Fox interview they were flying towards east, towards Mexico or San Diego area. Those would be compatible with that same location. But they don't fit other information.
The FLIR video
How about the FLIR video then, could that also be a balloon? That seems highly unlikely as it doesn't really look like a balloon, or a tic-tac for that matter. Especially in the infrared image:
_11%2C_makes_a_sharp_turn_above_the_flight_deck_aboard_the_Nimitz-class_nuclear-powered_aircraft_carrier_USS_Harry_S._Truman.jpg){kind=spacer}
It was filmed some time later and there's probably no direct connection.
Surely they could identify balloons?
So, could it really have been something as simple as balloons? Wouldn't they and their high tech radar been able to identify them? I believe Kevin Day already answered that:
I either thought it was some sort of a system error or something civilian related, like balloons.
Furthermore, in his fictionalized version of the events he wrote that:
These contacts could be almost anything. Canadian Geese flying south, ball lightening, weather balloons, ice, even a major CEC system malfunction.
Also according to that story, "no one else in Combat seemed to be paying any attention to the strange tracks" and:
The tracks were definitely real. Spread out evenly across his display, the tracks were all at about 28,000 feet and tracking south at around one hundred knots. Strange because the upper atmospheric jet stream along the West Coast of the United States normally travels from west to east. He was sure that was the case even now. Unless caught in a jet stream, airborne objects at 28,000 feet do not travel that slowly. They would more than likely fall out of the sky instead.Maybe he ruled out balloons because of incorrect assumptions about winds.
While military balloons in military training area do not necessarily follow FAA rules, even if they did, there's no requirement for transponders on unmanned balloons. FAA notes that:
Some operators have equipped their balloons with transponder beacons in addition to a radar reflection device or material required by 14 CFR Section 101.35, but at cruise altitude, the balloon's communications equipment and transponder, if so equipped, are operated intermittently to conserve battery energy.If Kevin Day's description of high quality tracking is accurate, it indicates those balloons had radar reflectors, which would speak against the common hypothesis that those would have been used for testing the radar. In that case they should probably have been harder to detect.
I have another candidate for those balloons, but that will have to wait for the next post.
Comments
Post a Comment