[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
United States News Title: UFOs Are Real, Retired Navy Commander Suggests Of Weird Aircraft Retired Naval Commander David Fravor was conducting a training mission off the coast of California in 2004 when he saw it an oblong craft flying erratically through his airspace at incredible speed, maneuvering in a way that defies accepted principles of aerodynamics. Fravor didn't know what to make of it, but said it was not like anything he had ever seen in nearly 20 years of flying. The wingless object was about 40 feet long and shaped like a Tic Tac, Fravor said. He described it is other-worldly. His dramatic retelling of the encounter comes as the Pentagon has acknowledged a secret program to investigate UFO sightings. The project was defunded in 2012 because of other budget priorities, but some sources involved in the program say the investigations are ongoing. UFOs have long fascinated the civilian world as well. The National UFO Reporting Center lists hundreds of witness accounts. You can see reported UFO activity in your state at this link. But to hear of UFOs from a retired military pilot adds some credibility to those reports. "I can tell you, I think it was not from this world," Fravor told ABC News. "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." Fravor's account is convincing. When he saw the object from the air, controllers on one of the Navy ships on the water below reported that objects were being dropped about 80,000 feet from the sky, then headed "straight back up." He could see the disturbances on the water below and breaking waves on the surface, "like something's under the surface," he told ABC. The radar jammed, and as Fravor flew closer, the craft rapidly accelerated and zoomed upward and disappeared. Once gone, the ocean below was a still sheet of blue with no evidence of disturbance. Infrared scanning also showed no evidence of an exhaust trail, he said. "I don't know what it is," he said. "I don't know what I saw. I just know it was really impressive, really fast, and I would like to fly it." Former Marine Col. Stephen Ganyard, an ABC News contributor, said the flight speed Fravor described is unheard of. "No aircraft that we know can fly at those speeds, maneuver like that and looks like that," he said. Fravor told the Washington Post he believes the craft was "something not from the Earth." "It was a real object, it exists and I saw it," he said. The encounter was one of many analyzed by the Defense Department's shadowy Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a $22 million, multi-year program begun in 2007 to investigate "unidentified aerial phenomena," according to reports by The New York Times and Politico. The craft analyzed during the five years of the program were vastly superior to anything in the U.S. or foreign militaries, the reports said. The five-year program was initiated in 2007 at the request of former Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, at the time the Senate majority leader, who slipped it in as an earmark. Nevada, of course, is the home of a U.S. Air Force facility known as Area 51, the source of multiple alien conspiracy theories, including claims that interstellar visitors are held there; that the 1947 Roswell crash wasn't a weather balloon at all, but a Soviet aircraft piloted by mutated midgets; and that the 1969 moon landing was filmed by the U.S. government in one of the Area 51 hangars. Reid said he had been prodded to fund the effort by fellow Nevadan Bob Bigelow, an aerospace titan and Defense Department contractor who told CBS News' "60 Minutes" that his grandparents had a close encounter with a UFO that "sped up and came right into their face and filled up the entire windshield of the car" before taking off at a right angle and "shot off into the distance." In the interview, which aired in May, Bigelow said he is "absolutely convinced" of alien life and that extraterrestrial visitors frequently travel to Earth. Reid said the late Ohio Sen. John Glenn, the first NASA astronaut to orbit the Earth and later the oldest man in space, also helped convince him the government should seriously investigate the UFO phenomenon, and should record the accounts of pilots and other military service personnel who have seen aircraft they couldn't explain or identify. Also backing the inquiry were the late Sens. Daniel Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, and Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska. Both World War II veterans, they were also concerned about potential national security interests, Politico said. Luis Elizondo, a career military intelligence official who ran the program, resigned in October, telling Secretary of Defense James Mattis in a letter that the program wasn't taken seriously. "Why aren't we spending more time and effort on this issue?" Elizondo asked. "We tried to work within the system," he told Politico. "We were trying to take the voodoo out of voodoo science." Many of the sightings, often reported in the vicinity of nuclear facilities, can't be explained, Elizondo said. "We had never seen anything like it," he told Politico. Elizondo now works for the for-profit To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, an initiative cofounded by Tom DeLonge, a former guitarist and vocalist for the rock band Blink-182, to explore the "outer edges of science" and technology. Some findings of the initiative remain classified. But one of the video and audio recordings that was released from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showed "an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves," The Times account said. The Navy pilots can be heard trying to understand the event. The location and date of the incident were not revealed. "This is an (expletive) drone, bro," one pilot says. "There's a whole fleet of them ..." another responds. "My gosh." "They're all going against the wind. The wind is 120 knots to the west." "Look at that thing, dude." "It's rotating." Watch for yourself below in the Defense Department video via The New York Times. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Deckard (#0)
Here's the Defense Department video: Now, compare that to a real encounter between two fighters where the target is jumping all around:
|
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|