THE UFO FILES
PETER BROOKESMITH surveys the latest fads and flaps from the world of ufological research
Mendoza’s Maxim No 42 states: “Ufology is a branch of showbusiness.” On occasion, it dwindles into a travelling circus, which is how the latest imbroglio over the ‘UFOs’ seen by US Navy pilots is developing. Or rather fracturing, as fresh allegations occur. One of the witnesses to the so-called ‘TicTac’ sighting in 2004 by Commander David Fravor and his wingmen was, according to his own account, Chief Petty Officer Kevin Day. Day was the air intercept controller on board the USS Princeton, where all the radar and other signals from ships and aircraft were co-ordinated and processed. Day maintained that shortly after another pilot went hunting for the ‘Tic-Tac’ and shot infra-red and video images of something, men in black, or anyway not in uniform, arrived by helicopter, cleaned the ship out of all records of the encounter, and flew tight-lipped away. (Other accounts say these characters were in uniform: whom can you believe?) Cmdr Fravor now tetchily suggests that CPO Day (and presumably others) is making this bit up. Oh dear. Day’s story, I have to say, reminds me of those implausible tales wherein the Army, or someone, moves in on the site of a crashed flying saucer and clears the ground of every teensy-weensy bit of wreckage, but updated for the digital age. Let’s see who else contradicts whom else in this increasingly laughable saga.
Well, here’s another chuckle already. Along comes Keith Kloor of The Intercept to report that a Department of Defense spokesman, Christopher Sherwood, has denied that former spook-turned-TTSAAS-frontman Luis ‘El Lizardo’ Elizondo ever led the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP): “Mr Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in OUSDI [the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence], up until the time he resigned effective 10/4/2017.” Oh, double dear. This is not what the DoD, in the shape of one Dana White, said before (but what do you expect? It’s a goddamn bureaucracy) and not what Elizondo has claimed. He, strangely, has refused to answer Kloor’s queries on the point. This revelation has been greeted with howls of rage and cries of “Garbage!” and “This is just making stuff up” from those who disagree (and disagree without confirmation or denial from anyone who might actually know for sure, of course).
Joseph Trevithick and Tyler Rogoway, in the ‘War Zone’ section of The Drive website, put another spanner in the works by pointing out that the famous FLIR-1 video comes from an unusual exercise: “When the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group [CSG] encountered the Tic Tac in 2004, it was in the midst of the first ever CSG-level operations of the initial iteration of the CEC [Co-operative Engagement Capability].” What the CEC does is fuse all the imagery, radar returns, and telemetry from all elements of the CSG – ships, aircraft, the lot, wherever they are (and maybe satellite data too for all one knows), so that a target invisible to (say) the immediate Nimitz flotilla but visible to another element can be engaged by the carrier, one of its escorts, or aircraft. And this was the first outing of the system. Now, wouldn’t you expect some odd things to turn up, and tricky exercises for the aircraft crews, to be part of that? We might bear in mind too that this was Cmdr Fravor’s first set of operational outings in the F/A-18 jet. (Which isn’t to say he didn’t see something weird happening in the water.)
Their grabber, though, is that the ‘Gimbal’ and ‘Go Fast’ videos come from a CSG led by the USS Theodore Roosevelt. “The carrier had only returned to the fleet after a major four-year-long overhaul, also known as a Refueling and Complex Overhaul (RCOH), in August 2013. This process included installing various upgrades, such as systems associated with the latest operational iteration of the Navy’s Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) and its embedded Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA) architecture.” In addition, the carrier’s massively upgraded ‘eyes in the sky’, the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, were having their first outing. In other words, that CSG was in much the same position as the Nimitz group 10 years earlier, testing highly sophisticated new kit, no doubt against all kinds of devious ruses dreamt up by those whom it might concern. All of which suggests that what we’ve heard or seen of what the pilots had thrown at them was, in the more exotic case(s), stuff that the military had up their sleeves (electronic or otherwise), or, more simply, pretty mundane stuff that the pilots were required to track to familiarise themselves with their new gear and what it could do. As I’ve said before, the videos as we know them prove nothing of ufological interest, are well below operational quality, and are probably a record of training exercises. Big deal.
As to the videos, a document purporting to be the DoD Form 1910 requesting release of same has emerged into public view. For a hefty rundown on this item, see John Greenewald’s analysis at the Black Vault (www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/ how-the-dd-form-1910-does-not-prove-apublic-pentagon-release). Not least of its problems is that half the form isn’t filled in or signed where it should be, but the thing that caught my eye was that it referred to the videos by name – Gimble (sic), and so on. Which is really odd, since all documents in whatever form are assigned a number in the US military, and these are not cited on the DD1910 we’ve seen. Oh dear again. Everything supposedly evidential about this case seems to be a right shambles, daft enough to make a horse laugh.