What, exactly, did the Navy encounter 15 years ago off the Southern
California coast, when fighter pilots spotted a UFO? These men were
there, too—and it's time they tell their side of the story.
The five men share an easy rapport with each other,
playfully ribbing one another while also communicating a deep sense of
mutual respect. It’s clear they all share the bond of having once served
in the armed forces. Yet for Gary Voorhis, Jason Turner, P.J. Hughes,
Ryan Weigelt, and Kevin Day—assembled together in a private group chat
by Popular Mechanics—something much bigger ties them together beyond simply serving in the U.S. Navy.
These men also share a connection of being witnesses to one of the most compelling UFO cases in modern history: the Nimitz UFO Encounters, an event that the Navy recently confirmed indeed involved “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Largely overshadowed by a grainy black-and-white video,
and a former Topgun fighter pilot eyewitness, these veterans offer new
and intriguing details on what occurred with the Navy’s Strike Carrier
Group-11 as it sailed roughly 100 miles off the Southern California
coast in 2004—details that a former career intelligence agent who
investigated the Nimitz Encounter while at the Pentagon can neither confirm, deny, or even discuss with Popular Mechanics.
Ultimately, these five men—the “other” Nimitz witnesses—could be key to understanding an event that a leading aviation defense expert says “likely wasn’t ours.”
So whose was it?
The Intercept
Stationed on the USS Princeton, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, as the Nimitz
carrier group went underway in early November 2004 for a routine
training exercise, this would be the last time former Petty Officer 3rd
Class Gary Voorhis would set sail aboard a Navy vessel.
Having already done almost six years in the Navy,
including two combat tours, Voorhis was ready to transition to life
outside the world of passionless grey metal hulls and vast leavening
seas.
“The group was going to be deploying in a
few months and there was a bunch of new systems, like the Spy-1 Bravo
radar,” Voorhis tells Popular Mechanics. “It was really about getting all the kinks out.”
While chatting with some of the Princeton’s radar techs, Voorhis says he heard they were getting “ghost tracks” and “clutter” on the radars. For Voorhis, the Princeton’s only system technician for the state-of-the-art Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) and AEGIS Combat System, news of these systems possibly malfunctioning was especially concerning.
Fearing the ship’s brand new AN/SPY-1B
passive radar system was malfunctioning, Voorhis says the air control
systems were taken down and recalibrated in an effort to clear
out—what’s assumed to be false radar returns.
“Once
we finished all the recalibration and brought it back up, the tracks
were actually sharper and clearer,” Voorhis says. “Sometimes they’d be
at an altitude of 80,000 or 60,000 feet. Other times they’d be around
30,000 feet, going like 100 knots. Their radar cross sections didn’t
match any known aircraft; they were 100 percent red. No squawk, no IFF
(Identification Friend or Foe).”
Sitting in the Princeton’s Combat
Information Center (CIC), Operations Specialist Senior Chief Kevin Day
was tasked with the critical role of protecting the airspace around the
strike group. “My job was to man the radars and ID everything that flew
in the skies,” Day said in the documentary film The Nimitz Encounters.
On
or around November 10, 2004, roughly 100 miles off the coast of San
Diego, Day began noticing strange radar tracks near the area of San
Clemente Island. “The reason why I say they’re weird [is] because they
were appearing in groups of five to 10 at a time and they were pretty
closely spaced to each other. And there were 28,000 feet going a hundred
knots tracking south,” Day said in the documentary.
In another YouTube clip, Ryan Weigelt, the former Leading Petty Officer and power plant specialist for the SH-60B “Seahawk” helicopter, recalled the tone aboard the missile cruise at the time.
“Senior
Chief Day, his name, was being called over the comms, no bullshit,
every two minutes.” Weigelt said. “I recall hearing something, like a
big, real-world scenario was going on, but I just didn’t really
understand.”
While Day and the Princeton’s
air traffic controllers continued to monitor the strange radar returns,
Voorhis says he began to take the opportunity to use the ship’s
advanced tracking systems to catch a glimpse of whatever these objects
were.
“When they’d show up on radar,” Voorhis
says, “I’d get the relative bearing and then run up to the bridge and
look through a pair of heavily magnified binoculars in the direction the
returns were coming from.” Describing what he saw during the daytime,
Voorhis says the objects were too far off to make out any distinguishing
features, however, he could clearly see something moving erratically in
the distance.
“I couldn’t make out details, but they'd just be
hovering there, then all of a sudden, in an instant, they’d dart off to
another direction and stop again,” Voorhis says. “At night, they’d give
off a kind of a phosphorus glow and were a little easier to see than in
the day.”
By November 14, the strange returns
had been continuously showing up for close to a week. With an air
defense exercise scheduled for that morning, Day convinced his
commanding officer to let him direct aircraft to attempt an intercept of
these anomalous radar returns. Day’s decision led the VFA-41 Squadron
Commander David Fravor to encounter what an “unofficial executive summary”
later described as “an elongated egg or a ‘Tic Tac’ shape with a
discernible midline horizontal axis” of approximately 46 feet in length.
With the intercept too far away for even high-powered binoculars, Voorhis, Day, and the rest of the Princeton
could only listen to the live communications chatter, as the
unidentified craft effortless evaded the two fighter jets by
demonstrating “an advanced acceleration, aerodynamic, and propulsion capability.”
Outmaneuvered by an object that’s colloquially become known for its
shape as the “Tic Tac,” Fravor and his wingman returned to the USS Nimitz.
In
a subsequent flight by another F/A-18, thanks to a state-of-the-art
ATFLIR targeting pod, Lt. Chad Underwood would successfully capture
video of the “Anomalous Aerial Vehicle,” or “AAV.”
For 13 years, the incredible story of the U.S. Navy being harassed and
outperformed by UFOs went largely unknown by the greater public.
However, in December 2017, after To the Stars Academy of Arts &
Science—a verbosely named UFO think tank founded by former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge—and the New York Times published a 1:16 clip of the ATFLIR video, the world suddenly became very familiar with the “Nimitz encounters.”
What hasn’t been discussed, however, is what the Nimitz’s
enlisted witnesses say happened after the now famous intercept with the
“Tic Tac.” Their testimony raises many more questions, debate, and even
some controversy.
The Mystery
Like many of the other sailors aboard the USS Princeton,
former Petty Officer 3rd Class Jason Turner knew something was up, but
didn’t exactly know what had been going on inside the CIC. It was only
during a chance encounter while delivering supplies to the ship’s Signal
Exploitation Space that Turner found himself being another unwitting
witness to the Nimitz’s UFO event.
A video playing on one of the console monitors
immediately caught Turner’s eye. In it, the “Tic Tac” performed a number
of seemingly impossible maneuvers, not seen in the brief clip released
in 2017. Turner described what he saw in the Nimitz Encounters documentary:
“This thing was going berserk, like making turns. It’s incredible the amount of g forces that it would put on a human. It made a maneuver, like they were chasing it straight on, it was going with them, then this thing stopped turning, just gone. In an instant. The video you see now, that’s just a small snippet in the beginning of the whole video. But this thing, it was so much more than what you see in this video.”
Even
now, Turner still appears visibly disturbed by whatever it is he saw
that day. “I asked a good friend of mine who worked in that area, is
this the training we’re going through?” he tells Popular Mechanics.
“No,” the friend replied. “This is real life.”
“No,” the friend replied. “This is real life.”
Equally
by chance, during the time of the now-famous intercept, after being
called to have a conversation with another detachment, Ryan Weigelt
found himself inside the Princeton’s CIC. According to Weigelt,
a video of an F/A-18 trying its best to catch the elusive “Tic Tac” was
playing on the monitors. Like Turner, Weigelt says what he saw was a
lot longer than the brief clip released in 2017.
“I was in there for quite a while and it was on the
screen the whole time. I could not tell you how long, but it was
playing when I went into combat and it was playing when I left,” Weigelt
said in a YouTube interview.
Voorhis tells Popular Mechanics that
he, too, saw a much longer and clearer version of the ATFLIR video
through the ship’s Top Secret LAN network. “I definitely saw video that
was roughly 8 to 10 minutes long and a lot more clear,” Voorhis says.
Did what he saw resemble any type of conventional aircraft?
“Umm,
no!” he says with a laugh. “In the video I saw, you got a good sense of
how the pilot was having a difficult time trying to keep up with this
thing. It kept making tight, right angle turns.”
The
most shocking claim these Navy veterans make is in what they say
happened with all the data tapes for the various systems that recorded
these UFO events.
The Visitors
Miles away from Voorhis, Day, Turner, and Weigelt, on the deck of the USS Nimitz
aircraft carrier, Petty Officer Patrick “PJ” Hughes was unaware of the
unidentified objects the Carrier group had been dealing with for the
past several days. Instead, as an aviation technician, one of Hughes’
jobs was to secure the hard drive data recorders from the airborne
early-warning aircraft, the E-2 Hawkeye.
“We call them bricks, but they contain the software
to run the airplane and they also record or can record a lot of the
data that the air crew sees during the flight,” said Hughes in a YouTube interview.
On
November 14, as Hughes performed this routine task, he was unaware that
the E-2 hard drives he was securing away in a classified safe had just
come from the Hawkeye that Day first tried to use to intercept the
mysterious UFOs.
Shortly after securing the
data bricks, Hughes said he was visited by his commanding officer and
two unknown individuals. “They were not on the ship earlier, and I
didn’t see them come on. I’m not sure how they got there,” said Hughes
of the two men.
According to Hughes, his
commanding officer told him to turn over the recently secured
harddrives. “We put them in the bags, he took them, then he and the two
anonymous officers left,” Hughes said.
Inside the Princeton,
Voorhis had a similar encounter. “These two guys show up on a
helicopter, which wasn’t uncommon, but shortly after they arrived, maybe
20 minutes, I was told by my chain of command to turn over all the data
recordings for the AEGIS system,” says Voorhis.
In addition to turning over his data tapes, Voorhis
says he was told by this chain of command he needed to reload the
recorders for the ship’s advanced Combat Engagement Center (CEC) because
it had also been wiped clean, along with the optical drives with all
the radio communications. “They even told me to erase everything that’s
in the shop—even the blank tapes.” Voorhis says the only other time he
can recall having to turn over his tapes like this was after an aircraft
crash during one of his combat deployments.
Up on the Princeton’s flight deck, Weigel says the two men initially arrived on the Princeton
via helicopter, wearing generic flight suits. According to Weigelt, the
men boarded one of his detachment’s SH-60B helicopters and flew off for
a time before returning with “a bunch of bags.” Weigelt says the two
men retired to the “Admiral’s Quarters”on the Princeton and a guard was staged outside of the door.
The Doubter
In a January interview on The Fighter Pilot Podcast, Cmdr.
David Fravor told fellow retired F/A-18 pilot and host Vincent Aiello
that the squadron’s video tapes of the “Tic Tac” intercept had
mysteriously vanished. Fravor said he believes it’s likely the tapes
were inadvertently recorded over.
“You know how
it is when you go to and from cruise,” Fravor said. “Someone goes,
‘What are these? Hey, they look like blank 8mm tapes. We’ll just use
them.”
In an interview with Popular Mechanics,
Aiello detailed the processes for securing flight tapes as Fravor
mentioned. Though these materials are classified, a number of different
qualified squadron personnel would have access to the safe where the
tapes would have been kept.
“It’s very
common, even for tapes you’ve marked and want to save, to inadvertently
get put back into circulation, handed out, and recorded over,” Aiello
says. “I think Cmdr. Fravor’s opinion on how the tapes went missing is
the most plausible explanation. However, a lot of squadron personnel
have access to those materials, so it leaves the door open that someone
could have intentionally taken them.”
Though Fravor has acknowledged the disappearance of data records, the Nimitz’s most well-known witness has equally pushed back on some of the enlisted sailor’s accounts.
Speaking at the McMenamin’s UFO festival
this past May, Fravor admonished some of the “other witness” accounts,
saying only the four pilots involved ever personally saw the “Tic Tac,”
that no one was asked to sign non-disclosure agreements [NDA], and that
“men in suits” never showed up on the ships.
During an October appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast,
Fravor said, “There’s still groups of people making stuff up, like
someone came out on ours and was talking about, he’s like, I saw the
whole video, the whole video is like 10 minutes long and it was doing
all this. That’s bullshit.”
Fravor told Rogan
that he was one of the top 20 highest ranking members of the carrier
group, and had there been any kind of formal investigation, he’d have
known about it.
“Okay, I’ll give you credit, if
they did, why wouldn’t they show up and talk to the guys who witnessed
it, chased it, and one of the senior guys in the battle group?” Fravor
asked.
Voorhis claims that in the days prior to
the intercept, he witnessed indistinct objects far in the distance. But
regarding Fravor’s intercept, he says, “His intercept? Nope, we were too
far away, plus I would not have known about it or the bearing of it.
Just that it was happening.”
None of the witnesses Popular Mechanics spoke with claimed they’d seen Fravor’s intercept of the unknown object.
In The Nimitz Encounters documentary,
Hughes said a friend and aircrew member on one of the E-2 Hawkeye
aircraft told him he had to sign an NDA about the incident. Since the
E-2 planes would have been in Carrier Wing Nine’s Airborne-Early Warning
Squadron VAW-117 (“The Wallbangers”), and not strike fighter squadron
under Fravor’s command, the possibility exists that the E-2’s squadron
commander could have issued an NDA to their crew without Fravor’s
knowledge. However, Popular Mechanics has not verified what Hughes was told. None of the witnesses we spoke with claimed they had signed an NDA.
The Nimitz’s enlisted witnesses stand by
their claims that two unknown officials showed up shortly after the UFO
incidents. However, they don’t describe them as being the sinisterly
sounding “Men in Black,” as Fravor has implied.
According
to Weigelt, it wasn’t at all uncommon to have people coming and going
that weren’t stationed on the ships. For him, it was only when he heard
Voorhis’ and Hughes’ accounts that the arrival of the two individuals on
the Princeton seemed to become related to the UFO events.
“I
just knew they were there for a reason, to do something they have to
do, and just stay the hell out of their way,” Weigelt said.
“Squadron
aircrew wouldn’t normally be notified if the ship’s radar or other
information was being used for an investigation,” says Guy Snodgrass, a
former F/A-18 pilot, Topgun instructor, and communications director for
former Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis.
While
Snodragss wouldn’t comment directly on the UFO event, he said he served
alongside the weapons systems officer inside Fravor’s plane during the
intercept.
“He’s a talented weapons systems officer (WSO) who has dedicated himself
to the naval aviation profession,” Snodgrass says about the pilot, who
has never spoken publicly and Popular Mechanics is choosing not
to name, as he is still serving in the U.S. Navy. “He also has the
acumen to correctly characterize anything out of the ordinary that he
might have seen, so I would bias towards giving his account more, not
less, weight.”
The Defenders
While investigating these claims, Popular Mechanics was able to locate and speak to a previously unknown witness who was with the Nimitz
carrier group in 2004. Unaware of some of their fellow shipmates
previously coming forward, and out of concerns related to security
oaths, the witness agreed to speak only under the condition of
anonymity.
“I do remember the events of 2004 very well,” says the witness, who at the time was an Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton.
“The decision was made to scramble two fighter jets to investigate.
From what the pilots described, the movement of the UFO was defying the
laws of physics.”
Popular Mechanics didn’t provide the witness with any of the previous claims.
“What
really made this incident alarming was when a Blackhawk helicopter
landed on our ship and took all our information from the top secret
rooms,” the witness says. “We were all pretty shocked and it was an
unspoken rule not to talk about it because we had secret clearances and
didn’t want to jeopardize our careers.”
Regarding
whether or not there was originally a longer recording than the
infamous UFO intercept, Aiello says that’s “entirely possible.”
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