"We Have a Real UFO Problem. And It’s Not Balloons."

We seriously are not alone. UFOs or UAPs are no joke.

On a clear, sunny day in April 2014, two F/A-18s took off for an air combat training mission off the coast of Virginia. 

The jets, part of my Navy fighter squadron, climbed to an altitude of 12,000 and steered towards Warning Area W-72, an exclusive block of airspace ten miles east of Virginia Beach. 

All traffic into the training area goes through a single GPS point at a set altitude — almost like a doorway into a massive room where military jets can operate without running into other aircraft.  

Just at the moment the two jets crossed the threshold, one of the pilots saw a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere — motionless against the wind, fixed directly at the entry point. The jets, only 100 feet apart, zipped past the object on either side. 

The pilots had come so dangerously close to something they couldn’t identify that they terminated the training mission immediately and returned to base. “I almost hit one of those damn things!” the flight leader, still shaken by the incident, told us shortly after in the pilots’ ready room. 

We all knew exactly what he meant. “Those damn things” had been plaguing us for the previous eight months. 

I joined the U.S. Navy in 2009 and underwent years of rigorous training as a pilot. Specifically, we are trained to be expert observers in identifying aircraft with our sensors and our own eyes. 

It’s our job to know what’s in our operating area. That’s why, in 2014, after upgrades were made to our radar system, our squadron made a startling discovery: There were unknown objects in our airspace. 

Initially, the objects were showing up on our newly upgraded radars and we assumed they were “ghosts in the machine,” or software glitches. But then we began to correlate the radar tracks with multiple surveillance systems, including infrared sensors that detected heat signatures. 

Then came the hair-raising near misses that required us to take evasive action. These were no mere balloons. 

The unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) accelerated at speeds up to Mach 1, the speed of sound. They could hold their position, appearing motionless, despite Category 4 hurricane-force winds of 120 knots. 

They did not have any visible means of lift, control surfaces or propulsion — in other words nothing that resembled normal aircraft with wings, flaps or engines. 

And they outlasted our fighter jets, operating continuously throughout the day. 

I am a formally trained engineer, but the technology they demonstrated defied my understanding. After that near-miss, we had no choice but to submit a safety report, hoping that something could be done before it was too late. But there was no official acknowledgement of what we experienced and no further mechanism to report the sightings — even as other aircrew flying along the East coast quietly began sharing similar experiences. Our only option was to cancel or move our training, as the UAP continued to maneuver in our vicinity unchecked. Nearly a decade later we still don’t know what they were.   

(snip) 

If the phenomena I witnessed with my own eyes turns out to be foreign drones, they pose an urgent threat to national security and airspace safety. If they are something else, it must be a scientific priority to find out.