My name is David, and I was a fighter pilot in the Navy. Commander of Strike Fighter Squadron 41, flying F/A-18 Super Hornets off the USS Nimitz carrier group. I know what I saw, and I'm calling because what I saw on November 14th, 2004, about 100 miles southwest of San Diego, changed everything I thought I knew about physics and aviation. I've been flying for over 18 years, thousands of hours in the cockpit. I'd been fighting a head cold that whole week, but I wasn't about to miss flight time. I know what aircraft look like. I know what weather phenomena look like. I know what birds, balloons, and drones look like. What I encountered that day was none of those things. And I wasn't alone, my weapons systems officer was with me, and two other pilots in a separate aircraft saw it too.
It started a few days earlier, around November 10th. The USS Princeton, an Aegis cruiser in our carrier group, their SPY-1 radar system started picking up these... objects. Multiple contacts, appearing at 80,000 feet, then dropping to 20,000 feet in less than a second. Then hovering. Then shooting back up. Senior Chief Operations Specialist Kevin Morrison was running the radar. He told us later he'd been tracking these things for days. They'd appear every day around the same time, descending from above 80,000 feet down to about 20,000 feet near the surface. Sometimes there'd be a dozen of them. The Aegis system is one of the most sophisticated radar arrays in the world. It doesn't make mistakes like that. Keith said he'd never seen anything move like that in his entire career.
So on November 14th, around one in the afternoon, I'm up doing a routine training exercise with my WSO, Lieutenant James. We're at about 20,000 feet, standard combat air patrol. Clear day, visibility maybe 50 miles, light winds. Perfect flying conditions. Then the Princeton radio operator breaks in. She says they've got a real-world tasking for us. They want us to investigate an unidentified contact. I'm thinking, okay, probably a small plane without a transponder, maybe a drug runner. Happens sometimes out here. The controller tells us the object is at our position, about 60 miles west of our location, maybe more, I don't remember the exact distance, and asks if we have any ordnance on board. We're carrying training missiles, nothing live. She tells us to go check it out anyway. Vector us toward these coordinates.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]