CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE DRONE KIND
UAS OR UAP?
Aircrew report a dramatic increase in unknown flying objects, some of which may be hi-tech drones deployed in a covert war between the US and its adversaries. DAVID CLARKE investigates the possible sources of the current drone epidemic.
Aircrew have reported a dramatic increase in close shaves with unknown flying objects, some of which may be hi-tech drones deployed in a covert electronic war between the US and its adversaries. DAVID CLARKE investigates the possible sources of the current UFO-drone epidemic including the mysterious incident that paralysed Gatwick airport in 2018.
The global media have been buzzing with UFO stories since news broke that the United States Senate has demanded a report on ‘Advanced Aerial Threats’ from the US Navy’s newly-constituted
UAP Task Force. The report, due in June, is likely to summarise a series of puzzling incidents involving anomalous aerial phenomena that have plagued the most advanced ships and aircraft in the US fleet since at least 2004. In November that year fast-moving UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) were detected by radars on the cruiser USS Princeton, part of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in the Pacific, that was operating in a military training zone off the coast of California (see FT403:40-47).
Pilots of F-18 Super Hornets sent to investigate later saw and filmed unusual objects including a fastmoving Tic-Tac shaped object that appeared to emerge from the ocean surface.
Two other brief cockpit video snippets obtained by F-18 pilots, later confirmed as genuine and unexplained by the US Department of Defense, originated from a more recent UAP flap in a ‘warning area’ off the East Coast of North America. According to the The NewYork Times, groups of small UAPs, one resembling “a spinning top”, were spotted frequently by US Navy Super Hornet crews during training missions from the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt during the summer of 2014 through to March 2015. In 2014, a Super Hornet pilot filed a near-collision report after a close encounter with a number of small “unknown objects” that resemble those frequently reported by civilian airliner crews in UK airspace [see panel]. Others had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes but could reach 30,000ft (9,150m) and apparent hypersonic speeds. A spate of intrusions and near collisions led the Navy to update its formal reporting procedure for its pilots.
Using Freedom of Information requests journalists Tyler Rogoway and Joe Trevithick of The Drive uncovered details of earlier incidents that occurred in a patch of restricted airspace off the coast of Virginia and North Carolina. Eight ‘hazard reports’, the equivalent of the ‘airmiss’ incidents investigated by the UK Civil Aviation Authority (UKAB), were filed by F-18 aircrew to the Navy Safety Center (NSC) between 2013 and 2019. These included three near mid-air collisions within one week in April 2014 that led an NSC official to warn “it may only be a matter of time before one of our F-18 aircraft has a mid-air collision with an unidentified UAS [unmanned aerial system].”
The UAS acronym highlights what Rogoway, in a follow-up investigation, believes is the most likely explanation: “A terrestrial adversary is toying with us in our own backyard using relatively simple technologies – drones and balloons – and making off with could be the biggest intelligence haul of a generation.” While Rogoway does not reject the possibility that some UAP reports made by military aircrew cannot be accounted for so easily, he feels the evidence is compelling that Russia and China are using unmanned platforms to spy upon latest high-tech military technology deployed by the US during naval exercises.
He points out that all the NSC FOI reports describe “jet-powered, missile-like drones and unmanned fixed-wing aircraft”, including multi-rotor drones and oddly shaped balloon-like objects, at high altitudes far out in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. One describes an “aircraft [that] was white in colour and approximately the size of a drone or missile” that passed down the right side of an F-18 Super Hornet with just 200ft (60m) separation while the crew were on exercises
LT RYAN GRAVES COULD NOT EXPLAIN THE OBJECT HE SAW WHILE TRAINING
at 17,000ft (5,200m), having left the Naval Air Station Oceana inVirginia on 27 June 2013. This UAP was climbing and had a visible exhaust trail, but nothing was detected on radars. Another UAP reported in March the following year “appeared to be small… approximately the size of a suitcase, and silver in colour” as it passed within 1,000ft (300m) of a US Navy aircraft at 19,000ft (5,800m). A swarm of similar balloon-like objects appeared in the warning area in the following month and there were occasional reports by aircrew of air-radar detections of small stationary objects.
Rogoway’s FOI requests also turned up a detailed flight incident report filed in March 2018 by an F-18 pilot who investigated a series of unexplained radar tracks in a warning area off the North Carolina coast. On reaching the location the pilot passed within 2,000ft (600m) of “a quadcopter-type drone” that appeared to be 3-4ft (90-120cm) wide and “seemed to be… hovering in place, or drifting with the wind”. This drone was part of a swarm of small, stationary objects that seemed to be operating across an area 40-50 miles (64-80km) across. By 2018 this Super Hornet squadron’s airborne radar had been upgraded with a new system that allowed them to detect objects with much smaller cross-sections that are likely to have been ignored by earlier radars.
Accounts by Navy aircrew who spoke to the NewYork Times described similar UAPs, detected both visually and occasionally on radar, high above the North Atlantic during 2014-15. These had no visible exhaust plumes but could reach altitudes of up to 30,000ft (9,150m) and apparently move at hypersonic speed. One F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot, Lt Ryan Graves, said he could not explain the object he saw while training for a deployment to the Persian Gulf. But he and his colleagues speculated they were part of some highly classified advanced drone programme.
But operated by whom? In a podcast interview Graves went further, adding that “if we do have what we would call a ‘red threat’, one of our traditional enemies [could be] using some type of new technology, or hard to identify technology… soaking up our radar and our sensor and our comms, watching our tactics on a daily basis.” So far, the US Department of Defense has been reluctant to speculate about the likely source, possibly to hide sensitive intelligence it has been gathering under the cover of its high-profile UAP taskforce, but US Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher admitted that new guidance was issued to the fleet following the flap in 2015. He said some reports “could have been commercial drones” but that in other cases, “we don’t know who’s doing this – we don’t have enough data to track this.”
In the absence of any obvious James Bondstyle super-villains, no civilian source has the capability or motive to launch swarms of intel-gathering drones at high altitudes far out at sea apart from the US’s two main traditional adversaries. Long range unmanned surveillance drones such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk, used by the US Air Force and NATO in Iraq and Afghanistan, can reach 50,000ft (15,300m), and the armed forces of many other countries are working on secret UAV projects. In the Condign report, produced for the MoD’s Defence Intelligence staff in 2000 (see FT396:28-29), author Ron Haddow said the USA and Israel have “a significant UAV programme” along with the European NATO nations. He admits “it is possible that experimental versions may be flown principally over coastal and sparsely inhabited regions of [the UK] in the future. Some of these may be reported as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena [UAP].”
As the NewYork Times noted: “No one in the [US] Defense Department is saying the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasise that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents.” There has been much online speculation about the US Government’s secret investigations of UFOs in the context of ‘extraterrestrial craft’. But journalists, including Tyler Rogoway, have begun to suspect the recent flaps have been generated not by ET visitations but as a direct result of electronic wargames that are ongoing between the United States and its two main adversaries in the Atlantic and Pacific. Since the 1940s, UFOs have proved a useful cover story for the testing of a range of other projects such as the U2 spy-plane and the Stealth program. So why not advanced drone programmes?