Latest / Safe Aerospace Podcast / Air Force Test Pilot Saw a Silent Triangular Craft Over an English Golf Course | Dan Isbell Part 1 of 2

Transcript

Air Force Test Pilot Saw a Silent Triangular Craft Over an English Golf Course | Dan Isbell Part 1 of 2 · Safe Aerospace Podcast

• 0:00
  As I had started walking toward it and began to descend.
• 0:04
  Looking at it.
• 0:05
  And then something possessed me to start walking toward it,
• 0:08
  and it appeared to be about 50 to 60ft long.
• 0:10
  It was sort of a triangular shape, sort of around the bottom and side of this
• 0:15
  craft was all of this changing lights, different colors of light.
• 0:19
  Did illuminate the ground at all or any the surroundings.
• 0:21
  Do you recall?
• 0:22
  No, it wasn't like it was casting light.
• 0:25
  It wasn't like beams of light.
• 0:27
  It took about six months to be fully certified as a NATO combat pilot.
• 0:31
  But then once you're certified, you're also then sitting full alert.
• 0:35
  But because I was the young guy, the youngest guy in the squadron,
• 0:38
  the newbie, I got the privilege of sitting on alerts
• 0:41
  that took up holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.
• 0:45
  And so on December 26th, that Friday, I was coming back from the base course.
• 0:49
  I'm driving myself home with my Corvette, so I as I'm driving,
• 0:52
  I noticed in my rearview mirror some really strange looking lights
• 0:56
  that are coming in very fast from behind me
• 0:59
  and they come beam me and it just stops instantly.
• 1:02
  But as I'm having that thought and then all of a sudden I go, wait a minute.
• 1:05
  I certainly held my first encounter to myself for nearly 45 years.
• 1:09
  Could have threatened my entire flying career.
• 1:11
  Especially the stigma was so bad back then.
• 1:14
  So I didn't tell a soul.
• 1:15
  It's kind of thing, though, that you you don't forget.
• 1:31
  Welcome back to the Safe Aerospace Podcast.
• 1:33
  My name is Ryan Graves.
• 1:35
  This will be part one of two parts with former
• 1:38
  Air Force fighter pilot turned test pilot Dan Isbell.
• 1:42
  He's had a number of incidents in his life and were excited to bring those to.
• 1:46
  You really blew my hair back.
• 1:48
  If you like this content, please be sure to like and subscribe!
• 1:51
  It's been incredible how fast we've grown.
• 1:53
  We're really building a strong community here.
• 1:56
  Also, be sure to go to Safe Aerospace if you want to learn
• 1:59
  more about our work and about the reports that we've received.
• 2:02
  And now my conversation with Dan Isbell.
• 2:05
  Welcome back to the Safe Aerospace Podcast.
• 2:07
  My name is Ryan Graves.
• 2:08
  Very excited to sit down here with Dan Isbell.
• 2:12
  I'll let him introduce his call sign.
• 2:14
  But we come from somewhat similar backgrounds. And,
• 2:19
  then you came forward to Americans for Safe Aerospace
• 2:22
  in May of 2023 to report several incidences that you've had.
• 2:28
  But first, you have an absolutely incredible.
• 2:31
  Aviation background.
• 2:33
  So love, just a quick introduction to yourself and,
• 2:36
  you know, hear a little bit about that before we get into the UUP stuff.
• 2:39
  So thanks for joining us. Okay. Well, thanks for inviting me.
• 2:42
  It's a real pleasure to be here.
• 2:43
  Great to finally meet you in person. Yeah.
• 2:46
  I really enjoyed our first interview for video cast, but, this is very special.
• 2:51
  So thanks for bringing me out.
• 2:54
  So I, I grew up kind of poor, and
• 2:56
  so I didn't have any experience with airplanes.
• 2:59
  None.
• 3:00
  Never even set foot on an airport.
• 3:02
  So I never flown.
• 3:04
  Didn't know anything about them.
• 3:05
  And I saw a TV commercial in black and white in about 1969,
• 3:09
  which the Air Force had put on
• 3:11
  just before the station's go to just total test pattern.
• 3:15
  And there's no programing after that.
• 3:17
  And it blew me away.
• 3:18
  It was F-104 Starfighter taking off.
• 3:21
  I, I now know out of Edwards on a test flight, had a photo chase airplane
• 3:26
  which was also a safety chase, and they were going up
• 3:28
  and doing maneuvers with the F-104 in its development.
• 3:32
  And they had this incredible accessible music,
• 3:37
  and they had a great narrator with a deep voice.
• 3:40
  And he was narrating the John Gillespie Magee Jr poem called High Flight.
• 3:45
  Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds and danced on laughter, silvered wings.
• 3:49
  And they had the airplane choreographing.
• 3:53
  They picked,
• 3:54
  I guess, parts of the footage from the photo chase
• 3:58
  and choreographed it, doing these roles
• 4:01
  and tumbling around in the clouds and and of course, as it gets
• 4:05
  to the end, talks about as I tread our as I
• 4:11
  as I was up in the on trespass sanctity of space,
• 4:15
  put out my hand and touched the face of God.
• 4:17
  And at that point, the F-104 had gone into one of these zoom climbs
• 4:21
  and just sort of disappears in the black, and it gave me such goosebumps.
• 4:27
  And I go, that's what I want to do with my life.
• 4:29
  And I was just sure of it then, but I had really no pathway,
• 4:34
  so I did the best I could in school.
• 4:36
  I skipped a year between 10th and 12th grade so I could get on with it quicker.
• 4:40
  Found out about ROTC.
• 4:42
  I didn't know about the Academy, but I applied to Air Force ROTC for a scholarship
• 4:48
  pilot
• 4:48
  scholarship, and I went through all this testing without any prior knowledge.
• 4:52
  I guess I guessed my way through it pretty well, and I did win,
• 4:56
  a scholarship for full ride.
• 4:58
  For years
• 4:59
  they paid for everything, and I could choose any school in the country to go to.
• 5:03
  So I chose Georgia Tech because of aerospace engineering,
• 5:05
  and they were ranked number one back in 73.
• 5:07
  And that that discipline.
• 5:09
  Still a very good school.
• 5:10
  Yeah. Great school.
• 5:12
  And then they turned me down
• 5:14
  and I so I made an appointment to see the dean of admissions,
• 5:17
  which turned me down and said, well,
• 5:19
  our minimum requirement is two years of high school calculus
• 5:21
  and you have no calculus.
• 5:23
  And I said, well, even if I'd stayed all 12 years,
• 5:25
  they didn't teach calculus at my high school.
• 5:28
  Said, don't you have a tutoring program for your athletes and stuff?
• 5:31
  And he said, yeah. I said, I'll be there every night.
• 5:33
  I'll guarantee you, I'll make an A in calculus one.
• 5:35
  And if I make an A in calculus one, when I be on at least an equal playing
• 5:40
  field with everybody else going into cocktails
• 5:42
  two maybe a little ahead of the people that didn't make an A in the first.
• 5:46
  And he said, well, yeah, if you could do that.
• 5:47
  And I said, well, I don't think you understand how determined I am.
• 5:50
  So I told him my circumstances and I had this one shot
• 5:53
  and that the reason I chose Georgia Tech is because you got the best aerospace
• 5:57
  engineering school,
• 5:58
  and I want to be an aerospace engineer, to be a test pilot someday.
• 6:02
  And he said, well, that's our toughest school.
• 6:05
  I said, great, bring it on.
• 6:07
  That's that's why it's important to me.
• 6:09
  I said, right now, there's only one thing standing between me and my ultimate goal,
• 6:13
  and it's you.
• 6:14
  I looked dead in the eye.
• 6:16
  I said, won't you please give me a chance?
• 6:19
  You won't be disappointed.
• 6:20
  And he did.
• 6:22
  And I did what I said I would do.
• 6:23
  And I made an A in first quarter calculus and science, all the courses.
• 6:26
  And then that set me on a good path.
• 6:28
  But that was an important decision.
• 6:31
  And it hadn't.
• 6:32
  If it hadn't been for that, I would not have made it to where I eventually did.
• 6:38
  So I went to pilot training, but there was about a
• 6:41
  indefinite delay right after graduation.
• 6:45
  So I got commissioned.
• 6:47
  But. And then I'm just not activated yet.
• 6:50
  So I'm thinking, what am I going to do?
• 6:52
  And I'm graduate advisor from Georgia Tech's aerospace engineering school came
• 6:57
  and he said, listen, we would like to have you working on your masters
• 7:02
  and we'll give you a full ride assistantship,
• 7:06
  but you're going to work on a project for NASA to determine
• 7:08
  how turbine blades are failing in the F-15s.
• 7:11
  And it's a mode three stress failure, meaning it's got both
• 7:15
  tension torsion and a thermal gradient.
• 7:18
  So we need you to create an apparatus to recreate
• 7:21
  those conditions in the lab.
• 7:24
  And we want you to test those turbine blades to failure over and over and again.
• 7:28
  And we're going to send that off to Metallurg
• 7:30
  just so they can figure this out.
• 7:32
  I said, okay, deal.
• 7:33
  But I said the day I get orders to pilot training,
• 7:37
  I'm leaving him and if I haven't finished
• 7:41
  and he said, okay, we'll accept that.
• 7:44
  And so about three quarters of the way through with my master's in aerospace
• 7:47
  engineering, I got orders to Williams Air Force Base in Arizona, pilot training,
• 7:52
  and I went to my graduate advisor and said, remember what I said?
• 7:55
  I don't want them to know.
• 7:56
  I've been here in school because I, you know,
• 7:59
  there's guys that that took an editor delay to finish a degree
• 8:02
  and then they end up losing their pod slot and going to Apha to teach.
• 8:06
  And I didn't want to be one of those.
• 8:07
  Nothing more important when you got, you know,
• 8:09
  you're on that path and losing your slot.
• 8:11
  I can I can relate to that.
• 8:13
  Yeah.
• 8:13
  Did you ever consider the Navy as a path?
• 8:16
  I did, I applied to both, but I told myself,
• 8:20
  whichever one comes in the mail and accepts me first.
• 8:23
  Yeah, I'll take it.
• 8:24
  And the Air Force came first, and.
• 8:26
  And I accepted it already.
• 8:28
  And of course, they were the ones that had the F-104, so.
• 8:31
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 8:32
  But yeah, my dad was in the Navy in World War two for the entirety of the war.
• 8:36
  Yeah.
• 8:36
  So it was important to him.
• 8:38
  He wanted me to be in the Navy.
• 8:40
  And I said, well, you know, I'm going to apply for both of them.
• 8:42
  In fact, I applied for the Army and the Marine Corps.
• 8:45
  Anything that would get me in the air, even if it was a helicopter.
• 8:48
  But my goal was to be
• 8:51
  an Air Force fighter
• 8:52
  pilot and test pilots, since they had given me the scholarship.
• 8:56
  So when often did pilot training and after that,
• 8:59
  at the end of the year, we didn't get choices about what we wanted to fly
• 9:02
  and just knew I wanted to fly fighters, but we didn't get to like say,
• 9:04
  oh, I want to be an F-16 fighter, F-15 pilot, or F-4, whatever.
• 9:09
  It just came down in a block.
• 9:11
  And all of our fighter assignments, except for one,
• 9:15
  were F-111 to the left seat to be aircraft commander.
• 9:18
  They had never done that before.
• 9:20
  Such a complex airplane they normally had required.
• 9:23
  You have at least one other fighter with at least 1000 hours,
• 9:27
  and then you go to the right seat and you be a pilot
• 9:30
  weapon systems officer until they decide you can upgrade to the left seat.
• 9:35
  So this was a shock, and I guess it was a trial balloon
• 9:38
  to see if students out of pilot training could actually handle the airplane.
• 9:43
  And some of us made it through and some didn't. But,
• 9:48
  for me as an aerospace engineer, I kind of relished the opportunity
• 9:51
  because here's a plane, the first ever variable swing wing.
• 9:55
  And the F-111.
• 9:56
  B was the Navy's version that was supposed to be, you know, part of this.
• 10:00
  And it had the B model had the same radar that eventually was in the Tomcat
• 10:04
  in the A model and took the Phoenix missiles.
• 10:07
  So it was quite, quite amazing that they put all that in there in the B model.
• 10:13
  But you know, it was a little heavy
• 10:15
  and really hard on the tailhook landing on the system.
• 10:19
  So the Navy decided against it.
• 10:21
  But out of that came the second variable swinging the famous Tomcat.
• 10:27
  I never got to fly the tomcat. I wish I did.
• 10:29
  I've flown a number of Navy airplanes, including the F-18, but never the Tomcat.
• 10:33
  Anyway, I really
• 10:34
  enjoyed my time in the F-111.
• 10:37
  My first assignment
• 10:38
  after I went through the replacement training unit in Mountain Home, Idaho,
• 10:43
  I went to the United Kingdom,
• 10:45
  was stationed at RAF Upper Heyford, and I was there for four and a half years.
• 10:49
  I was like your your operational first operational tour?
• 10:52
  Yes. Yeah.
• 10:53
  And because we had a tactical nuclear role,
• 10:57
  it took a while to get all the clearances to,
• 11:00
  to upgrade to a t s CI clearance.
• 11:04
  And of course we're under a personal liability program.
• 11:07
  So, you know, you got to see the site if anything's in question.
• 11:11
  Is that a different personal reliability program than what an average
• 11:14
  pilot would be on because you were working with nuclear capable systems?
• 11:19
  Exactly. Yeah. Everything to man control.
• 11:22
  And we did alert sitting with live weapons.
• 11:25
  That was all not released to the public at that time.
• 11:30
  But of course, the
• 11:31
  mod knew that we were we were defending NATO with
• 11:35
  those should the, should the Cold War break into a hot war.
• 11:40
  So we set alert very frequently.
• 11:42
  And because I was the youngest guy and the new me in the 79th Attack Fighter
• 11:48
  Squadron, which was a great squadron, was all the way back to World War one.
• 11:52
  It's currently a are assigned to the block
• 11:55
  50 F-16s in South Carolina.
• 11:59
  And they're the the modern
• 12:04
  go after the
• 12:06
  missile systems.
• 12:08
  So they put themselves
• 12:09
  in danger to get lit up and then take them out with harm missiles.
• 12:12
  So that roll had been done by a four GS before that, and then the F,
• 12:17
  the F-16 block 50 took that program
• 12:21
  anyway.
• 12:24
  Because of that, I said on holidays
• 12:27
  during, the other people that had more seniority could be with their families.
• 12:31
  And one of those holidays that year was Christmas.
• 12:33
  So I was on the the week we would go like Friday to Friday
• 12:38
  and I that Thursday was December 25th.
• 12:41
  And then the day after Christmas was
• 12:44
  when I changed over to the next crew.
• 12:48
  And and we can get into that in a bit.
• 12:50
  But that's where I had my first encounter on the way home from that assignment.
• 12:56
  Then I'd also,
• 12:58
  as I finished, was finishing up my tour there.
• 13:01
  I'd been selected for an F-16 following assignment,
• 13:04
  consecutive overseas tour to talk on air base in Madrid, Spain.
• 13:08
  And I was all excited about that.
• 13:10
  And I flew down there on a European Eagle, which was a C-130.
• 13:13
  You can just fly around the NATO and
• 13:16
  and the only other guy that actually got to go to pilot training
• 13:20
  and out of my graduating class of ROTC guys, there was only two of us
• 13:24
  that ended up getting to go, and his name was Phil Breedlove.
• 13:28
  And Phil Breedlove went all the way to four star general
• 13:31
  and was the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe in his final tour.
• 13:36
  So he and I got to go to.
• 13:38
  Yeah.
• 13:39
  And we we went same pilot training class and so we went through that together.
• 13:44
  Great guy.
• 13:45
  Just a really great guy and still very involved.
• 13:48
  Four star general.
• 13:49
  Never seemed to get to retire. Yeah.
• 13:51
  But anyway,
• 13:53
  that was a very special experience for me because he was already stationed there.
• 13:57
  He had just moved to there and he was going to be my sponsor.
• 14:00
  So he already got my patches and my scarf and oh, it was exciting.
• 14:05
  The whole squadrons were, you know, really welcoming me.
• 14:07
  And we did a Friday night beer called The Other and he took me.
• 14:11
  He said, I found a few houses that you might want to rent,
• 14:14
  and one of them had a swimming pool in the front
• 14:17
  yard and a grape over arbor over in the driveway.
• 14:20
  It was a beautiful place in the foothills there, and I just gorgeous.
• 14:24
  I said, man, this is it.
• 14:26
  So I put a down payment on that to rent it, $100 deposit.
• 14:30
  And I was all excited.
• 14:31
  And as I flew back on the European Eagle back to RAF Upper Heyford in England,
• 14:35
  I started thinking, you know, I just applied for the test pilot school
• 14:39
  to get my name in the hat, but no one, I didn't have enough hours or
• 14:43
  I only had this one airplane experience.
• 14:45
  And normally they require
• 14:47
  two airplane experience and a lot, a lot older person than me.
• 14:51
  But I'm just trying to get my foot in the door.
• 14:53
  So get back home and I get a call.
• 14:56
  And so the command post is patching me
• 14:58
  through to a call file of Randolph Air Force Base here in Texas.
• 15:02
  And the guy didn't introduce himself for what's going on.
• 15:05
  And he says,
• 15:05
  I understand you have an assignment, the F-16, to talk on air base
• 15:09
  and that you're going to Luke for training on such and such date.
• 15:12
  I said, yep, that's that's correct.
• 15:14
  And he said, have you shipped household goods yet?
• 15:18
  And I said, no, the Packers come Monday.
• 15:20
  So this is on the Friday before.
• 15:23
  And he said, have you made any financial commitments
• 15:25
  that you're unwilling to absorb out of pocket?
• 15:29
  I said, well, I'll put $100 deposit on a house down in Spain. And
• 15:33
  I shipped my Corvette to the States and sitting in a New York harbor right now.
• 15:39
  But no, I guess not.
• 15:40
  What are you asking?
• 15:40
  He said, well, this is the test pilot school board, and we wanted to know,
• 15:44
  do you want to go to your F-16 assignment,
• 15:47
  which was my absolute coveted
• 15:49
  favorite bird that I wanted to fly.
• 15:53
  Aren't you want to go to test pilot school?
• 15:56
  And I got this mental image that he maybe had a red marker and ready
• 15:59
  to make a big X across my package if I turned it down.
• 16:03
  And I thought,
• 16:03
  well, this is my whole dream, but I didn't want to let go of the F-16.
• 16:07
  But then I thought, no, wait a minute.
• 16:09
  I graduated test pilot school
• 16:10
  and I'm becoming F-16 test pilot, which would be even more fun.
• 16:15
  So I accepted that change.
• 16:17
  And so instead of taking my wife to beautiful house with a swimming pool
• 16:22
  and just a lovely setting all around Madrid.
• 16:26
  Yeah, we're taking her out to the desert and the Mojave Desert
• 16:29
  at Edwards Air Force Base, but she was a good sport about it.
• 16:32
  And and off we went.
• 16:33
  And that was in the summer of 1984.
• 16:38
  So I went
• 16:39
  through the test pilot school and graduated very well.
• 16:42
  Didn't expect to be number one, but that's how it ended up.
• 16:45
  But, you know, it was my dream.
• 16:47
  So I was really working hard at it.
• 16:50
  And then I had, right before I graduated,
• 16:53
  one of the things that test pilot students and then later test pilots
• 16:56
  get to do is called qualitative evaluation flying.
• 17:00
  Okay.
• 17:01
  When you go out with an airplane you're not trained in, you have no instructor.
• 17:05
  You just get in and you fly.
• 17:06
  It kind of feel it out. Yeah.
• 17:08
  And you use all your and this is later in the course.
• 17:11
  So you use everything you've been taught to look at the airplane, study its design,
• 17:15
  think about their flow, think about all the things
• 17:17
  that that would be handling quality maybe issues.
• 17:22
  You read the flight manual.
• 17:24
  You memorize the
• 17:26
  the emergency, you know, code red stuff so that if you've got to have the bold
• 17:30
  face, you have that memorized and then you climb in.
• 17:33
  So we got guys that had experience nothing but like B-52s with 5 or 6 man crew
• 17:39
  that are stepping into a sevens when there's never was a second cockpit
• 17:44
  and going out and flying them
• 17:46
  with just a guy in a chase airplane, you can't do the controls for you.
• 17:49
  And so
• 17:51
  it was quite an experience for them. For me.
• 17:53
  I relished every minute of all of that.
• 17:55
  And I and they would try to get around 35 different aircraft during the school.
• 17:59
  Oh, really?
• 18:00
  And so we did a lot of exchanging with the Navy's test pilot school,
• 18:05
  Patuxent River, Maryland.
• 18:06
  And I'm sure you're familiar with them.
• 18:08
  They they did the only rotary wing test course.
• 18:13
  Okay. I wasn't aware of that. Yeah. Yeah.
• 18:15
  So one of the things that.
• 18:16
  Would be difficult doing being fixed wing and then going to do a
• 18:20
  flight on a helicopter.
• 18:22
  So but that was what I thought if I want to try that.
• 18:27
  So I put my name in the hat to, to go fly helicopters there.
• 18:32
  And, and I'd already had a chance in qualify airplanes.
• 18:35
  They brought to Edwards to fly the S three which was, you know,
• 18:39
  one of the ship based aircraft carrier based submarine Hunter aircraft.
• 18:44
  I know we both know David Favor.
• 18:46
  Well, you know who he is at least.
• 18:47
  But that was actually his first aircraft.
• 18:49
  Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah.
• 18:50
  That's an interesting airplane.
• 18:52
  I didn't fly it off the carrier just flew it off Edwards.
• 18:54
  And then I got a chance to fly the P-3, which was the land
• 18:58
  based with a big magnetic anomaly detector boom in the back.
• 19:01
  And again, when I say fly them, we're talking about
• 19:04
  if it's a two place airplane in the front, you fly in the captain's chair, you know
• 19:08
  the left, see if it's a helicopter, you fly in the right seat. So
• 19:12
  really a
• 19:13
  privilege because the people that came knew that, okay, this guy's,
• 19:17
  you know, in test pilot training and he's obviously pretty good.
• 19:20
  And they wouldn't be letting him come try this.
• 19:23
  But I enjoyed.
• 19:24
  At the same time, you know, you are,
• 19:26
  you know, inducing a lot of risk being in that platform for the first time.
• 19:30
  So actually probably a pretty interesting dynamic.
• 19:32
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 19:34
  And again like airplanes like the A seven and the A-10 I've flown both of those.
• 19:38
  There are no two seat variants of them.
• 19:40
  And so you just you just do
• 19:41
  your best of understanding the airplane before you get to it.
• 19:45
  Do a good walk around thinking about everything that
• 19:47
  that might be different about it, and then go up there and give it a go.
• 19:51
  And so I continued doing that throughout my career.
• 19:54
  And a before I retired, I had,
• 19:58
  flown 70 different types of models.
• 20:01
  And one of those was the the early F-18, not the Super Hornet, but the marine.
• 20:06
  It was a marine Corps brought it in.
• 20:08
  They had a two seater and the marine pilot sat in the back.
• 20:11
  I sat in the front
• 20:12
  and I got to park that thing at 70 degrees angle of attack stably.
• 20:16
  Now it was going down.
• 20:17
  It didn't have the thrust to keep that,
• 20:19
  but I had never seen 70 degrees angle of attack in any airplane.
• 20:23
  You could feel the vibrations of vertical tail.
• 20:25
  This was before
• 20:26
  they put the splitter plates on the top of the legs to kind of move.
• 20:30
  That vortex was amazing.
• 20:32
  Look back and, you know,
• 20:33
  barely see the frequency of those tails vibrating, but you could feel it.
• 20:37
  And the aircraft had amazing
• 20:40
  avionics for foreign aircraft of that type.
• 20:43
  And cockpit was bigger than the F-16, quite as big as an F-15.
• 20:47
  But the F-15 seemed like a coward.
• 20:50
  And I flown the A's, the seas, the
• 20:54
  even the prototype of the E!
• 20:56
  It was such an exciting time to to really experience flight
• 21:01
  from a guy that had never even touched an airplane before all of this.
• 21:05
  Well, let me let me real quick.
• 21:06
  You know, I mean, the Super Hornet was very maneuverable as well.
• 21:10
  You know, people think of fighters. How fast can it go?
• 21:12
  How many G's gonna pull?
• 21:14
  And I'm sure you're probably where being as fast as possible
• 21:17
  or pulling the most used necessarily isn't the best.
• 21:21
  Best thing you want to.
• 21:22
  That's not the goal in dogfight, right?
• 21:23
  Being fastest and always a bass.
• 21:25
  No, but the FAA team was unique because it could bleed airspeed so fast.
• 21:29
  Yeah, it's extremely maneuverable.
• 21:30
  I mean, one of the I enjoyed doing it more, almost anything.
• 21:33
  It just just like you said, going vertical on the cans as slow as I can.
• 21:37
  Basically I get down to 80 knots and just hang out there and then, you know,
• 21:43
  most people don't realize this, but, you know,
• 21:44
  when you're in a fight, you're basically Max performing the jet one way or another.
• 21:48
  And, you know, gravity always wins.
• 21:50
  You're always basically depleting your energy until you get to the deck.
• 21:53
  And then the fight transitions from,
• 21:56
  what we call two circle.
• 21:57
  We were trying to ride around on the Persian, the one circle where who can go
• 22:00
  the slowest and get behind F18 was was phenomenal at doing that.
• 22:06
  And then you combine that with a high off board sight missile
• 22:08
  and there wasn't too many people we couldn't take out.
• 22:11
  Yeah. It's fascinating. Airplane.
• 22:14
  I was, I was working in the Pentagon in program analysis
• 22:18
  and evaluation, and they had never hired a test pilot for that job before.
• 22:21
  But they they recruited me right out of
• 22:24
  the National Defense University.
• 22:26
  I was going through the Air Command and Staff College.
• 22:28
  They recruited me because I was a test pilot,
• 22:30
  even though I didn't have an operation
• 22:32
  as research systems analyst degree, which is what's normally in that seat.
• 22:36
  And they brought me into an office and.
• 22:41
  Man, I got to sit in Boyd's
• 22:44
  seat, his desk, and he was there.
• 22:47
  Yeah.
• 22:48
  Not just the position, but his physical desk, his.
• 22:51
  Physical desk, his office, his desk that that became my office.
• 22:55
  And we didn't have a Navy rep when I first got there.
• 22:58
  So I, you know, they they made me wear civilian coat and die every day.
• 23:02
  I hadn't wear my uniform at all ever in the Pentagon because I'm said,
• 23:06
  you're not working for the Air Force
• 23:07
  now you're working for the secretary of defense.
• 23:10
  So I quickly had to go out and buy a wardrobe
• 23:13
  because I didn't really have those kind of clothes. Yeah.
• 23:15
  And then,
• 23:18
  my boss, who was a brilliant
• 23:20
  man, he was one of those MIT whiz kids hired under McNamara.
• 23:24
  And it was McNamara that created the F-111 program.
• 23:28
  And he had done some work in the ship field for a while.
• 23:31
  And then he he became the head of the all of the aviation
• 23:34
  stuff, attack air, tactical aviation.
• 23:38
  So we had the F-18 Super Hornet in development test at that point.
• 23:43
  And they had a wing drop phenomenon
• 23:46
  that was happening early in the test program, which they solved.
• 23:49
  But in all of a sudden.
• 23:52
  Sonic regime or is this.
• 23:53
  Yeah, I remember learning about that. Yeah.
• 23:56
  And, you know, of course OSD is really worried.
• 23:59
  I wonder, you know, are they going to be able to save the program?
• 24:01
  And they did.
• 24:02
  But I got to go down and talk to the Navy
• 24:04
  guys and, you know, get details and bring that back to my boss.
• 24:08
  And every night he would pick my brain on stuff.
• 24:11
  He said, the main reason we brought you up here is because the F-22,
• 24:14
  we do not understand what we're getting into with this airplane.
• 24:19
  And so
• 24:19
  he had me explaining things about the F-22.
• 24:23
  And so I was really hawking that for the OSD in the Air Force.
• 24:27
  And I ended up doing a very
• 24:30
  technical thing
• 24:32
  for the Secretary of Acquisition,
• 24:35
  because the Air Force kind of refused to do the kind of study they wanted, but
• 24:39
  they wanted a, the one on one and, you know, higher level
• 24:43
  and then a full more engagement, putting the f 22
• 24:48
  in comparison to the two s slept, you know, a service life extension
• 24:53
  F-15 with a little bit of treatment for reducing
• 24:56
  some of the signature and the
• 24:59
  what was the Joint Strike Fighter at the time, which later became,
• 25:02
  you know, the F 35.
• 25:05
  And so we also had to include in the war game, you know, things like the B-2. So
• 25:11
  I had so many
• 25:13
  USF clearances to be able to do that
• 25:16
  and went out to some of our FFR DCS
• 25:19
  and also got permission to get Lockheed skunkworks involved.
• 25:23
  And I said, you know, their their testing won't be the final answer, but
• 25:27
  it'll be in comparison because they've got probably the best models.
• 25:31
  And they allowed me to do that.
• 25:32
  And anyway, the final analysis was pretty convincing
• 25:36
  that now the F-22 is definitely worth keeping because of all the things
• 25:40
  it's going to be able to do that none of the are the airplanes could do.
• 25:44
  So it kind of saved the program at the time.
• 25:46
  And but I got a lot of appreciation from some very high up people in the,
• 25:51
  in the Defense Department for finally giving them a real no kidding, big deal
• 25:56
  decision.
• 25:57
  Yeah, technically, what year was this.
• 26:00
  That would have been in,
• 26:02
  let's see, I was in the Pentagon from 98 through 2001.
• 26:07
  So probably around the year
• 26:10
  2000 or maybe 99.
• 26:13
  That's when they they wanted that study done.
• 26:15
  And I delivered.
• 26:16
  You know, the F-22 versus the JSF, right?
• 26:21
  Different platforms in a lot of different ways.
• 26:23
  You know, the correct me if I'm wrong, but, you know, at least
• 26:27
  as a Navy guy looking at that platform, it was designed to be
• 26:31
  a superior fighter in a lot of ways, obviously more stealthy.
• 26:35
  I was wondering, you know, if you can if you can share
• 26:38
  what were the the characteristics that you had
• 26:42
  that made it an acceptable next generation fighter?
• 26:45
  Because there's been a lot of controversy, like,
• 26:47
  do we really want to have an extremely fast, extremely maneuverable,
• 26:50
  really great fighter, or do we want to have, you know,
• 26:53
  in contrast, a Joint Strike Fighter type aircraft 35,
• 26:56
  which is almost a situational awareness drinker, right?
• 27:00
  Just takes in all the information,
• 27:01
  can act as a as a battle commander, mission commander for multiple platforms.
• 27:05
  It's not as maneuverable.
• 27:07
  It's perhaps more stealthy.
• 27:09
  I don't know what
• 27:10
  what what was your assessment of the 22, why it would be so valuable?
• 27:13
  Well, I had been in Edwards as a test pilot school instructor during
• 27:16
  the time that the fly off happened between the Y of 23 and the YF 22.
• 27:22
  So these are the test models.
• 27:23
  Those were the what ultimately came the F-22 and the F-35.
• 27:26
  Correct.
• 27:27
  No, no.
• 27:27
  For the wife, 23 was a competitor. The
• 27:32
  really gangly
• 27:33
  looking airplane with very canted out
• 27:36
  that were both horizontal and vertical tails,
• 27:40
  was actually a faster airplane
• 27:42
  than the F-22 and actually a little stealthy.
• 27:45
  But Lockheed did some things in their program secretly
• 27:51
  not unannounced, but, they
• 27:54
  they decided that during the test program.
• 27:56
  No, it wasn't a requirement that they would actually fire a name nine
• 28:01
  X out of the side bay and firing em ram out of the main bay and show
• 28:07
  the the aircraft's capabilities like that.
• 28:11
  And of course, the F-22 was the only one that had thrust vectoring nozzles.
• 28:14
  And they're not 3D.
• 28:16
  They're 2D because they're very stealthy from the rear as well.
• 28:19
  And they could count 22 degrees plus and minus.
• 28:23
  And that gave tremendous maneuverability.
• 28:25
  And of course, I know you've seen one at an air show before.
• 28:28
  And what one.
• 28:29
  Yeah.
• 28:29
  Did you, I thought one at risk
• 28:33
  of taking a slightly off track, but firing a name.
• 28:36
  Nine X is one thing, but allowing allowing the ability
• 28:40
  to utilize a seeker, which creates a lot of value is a whole nother thing.
• 28:44
  And having it internal to the body limits that capability quite a bit.
• 28:49
  It definitely does.
• 28:50
  And so what I would fight them and, you know,
• 28:52
  we were fighting rag students, the, the guys going through the rag.
• 28:54
  So they weren't that great.
• 28:56
  But I mean, we would take
• 28:58
  six or 7 or 8 shots on them, you know, during the whole fight.
• 29:01
  And then we get down to that one circle fight at the end and all right,
• 29:05
  then you just see them kind of do one of these and come down and,
• 29:08
  you know, get that last shot and, and call the knock
• 29:11
  it off and fights over and it's like, okay, you want congratulations.
• 29:15
  But well, I don't want to get into too much detail,
• 29:17
  but I'll just say the secret limitations were a real concern for them.
• 29:20
  Yeah. In their ability.
• 29:21
  And they have been
• 29:22
  in fact in the the upgrade program, the very expensive upgrade program.
• 29:26
  Are they going to do a lot to to bring it up to standards?
• 29:30
  They're finally going to have a helmet mounted display
• 29:32
  that can actually work within that very refined cockpit.
• 29:37
  It has a lot of very special metals in it
• 29:40
  to streamline and not have anything coming into the cockpit.
• 29:43
  No reflections there even though it's just pure polycarbonate.
• 29:47
  So there there were limitations on the technologies available
• 29:51
  to do a helmet
• 29:51
  mounted display in that aircraft, even though we got it
• 29:54
  into all the fourth generation fighters.
• 29:55
  And of course, it was integrated for complete
• 29:58
  everywhere with the Dash system and the Up 35.
• 30:02
  And I developed a lot of the capabilities on that binocular system
• 30:08
  for the Up 35 using F-16 simulators, the dome simulators at Fort Worth.
• 30:14
  It was quite interesting what you could do with that.
• 30:16
  They looked at doing it into the F-16, but we didn't have enough core
• 30:19
  processing power.
• 30:20
  In fact, the the JSF didn't the way it was originally planned.
• 30:24
  But time caught up and Moore's Law caught up.
• 30:26
  And next thing you know, you could actually do it.
• 30:29
  So that very expensive helmet has capabilities we've never seen before.
• 30:33
  And like you say, it just sucks up all the information all around it.
• 30:37
  And the dash system is truly amazing in there.
• 30:39
  They're even upgrading the 35
• 30:41
  with a something that's like four times as high resolution.
• 30:45
  I forget what Dash stands for, but do you do you recall?
• 30:50
  But it's basically a distributed it's.
• 30:52
  A distributed aperture. System system.
• 30:54
  That's what it is.
• 30:54
  So basically around the craft itself,
• 30:56
  sensors, infrared sensors, I understand perhaps it's something else as well
• 31:00
  allow you to take missile launches, you know, behind you.
• 31:04
  Yeah.
• 31:04
  All sorts of stuff.
• 31:05
  And that gets pumped into to the helmet. Yeah.
• 31:07
  And it's a it's like a basketball around you.
• 31:10
  You can see up down back for you can look down between your legs
• 31:14
  and you don't see the airplane, you see what's directly below you.
• 31:18
  And so you know, you can pick up people in the heat signature of people,
• 31:22
  the equipment tanks, armor, whatever out there.
• 31:26
  And the beauty of it is you just anywhere you look,
• 31:29
  you can designate that that's my target and go for it.
• 31:33
  And that's. Super helpful.
• 31:34
  I mean. That's.
• 31:35
  Yeah, even F-18, we had the system
• 31:38
  helmet mounted cueing system and nowhere near the amount of capabilities.
• 31:41
  But even just being able to look and designate
• 31:43
  a point on the ground, never mind a moving target was super valuable.
• 31:46
  Yeah.
• 31:47
  Well, the F-22, even though it has dogfighting capabilities,
• 31:50
  which are generally pretty good, it was really optimized for BR.
• 31:55
  And the radar that was put in it was the most powerful,
• 31:59
  a active electronically scanned array and that had ever been invented.
• 32:03
  It had all kinds of
• 32:06
  frequency hopping
• 32:07
  in it to try to not let it be seen.
• 32:10
  But they never did put even a basic forward looking infrared system in it.
• 32:15
  So that's been a deficit that they're going to try to make up for.
• 32:19
  But the time that they made the requirement for that in the 80s,
• 32:23
  it was all about defeating the Soviet Union's latest,
• 32:28
  you know, eschew 27 and follow ons to that.
• 32:32
  And so it was it was optimized for a Cold War scenario,
• 32:37
  which is one of the reasons it didn't have a lot of range
• 32:39
  compared to what they're looking for now for a Pacific theater.
• 32:43
  And not only not only range, but, you know,
• 32:47
  it's moving away from active systems as well.
• 32:50
  Anything that you're emitting from a craft is now a homing
• 32:53
  signal, more or less for enemy capability.
• 32:56
  And even that fatigue is getting,
• 32:59
  oh gosh, what are they called?
• 33:00
  But they're getting,
• 33:03
  oh. Slipping my mind the forward looking.
• 33:05
  It's not a flier pod, obviously,
• 33:07
  but it's a, it's a targeting system and infrared targeting system.
• 33:10
  A passive targeting system.
• 33:12
  I guess some buddies been flying around with it.
• 33:14
  I mean, the Russians have had those,
• 33:16
  I think, since the 80s or 90s, but we just never invested into them.
• 33:20
  Well, they're putting two IR sensor pods that are also very stealthy out
• 33:25
  on the outboard sections of the F-22 in this upgrade,
• 33:28
  and that's going to give them stereoscopic IR.
• 33:32
  Plus, when you take your wingman and other sources
• 33:36
  and you blend all that together without sending a single radar trace out
• 33:41
  there, you're going to get 3D orientation of where the target is.
• 33:46
  And of course, that can all be fed into your aim nine X,
• 33:50
  but it's optimized to go really high
• 33:53
  and not as fast as like our predecessor aircraft like the F-111 was a mock
• 33:58
  2.5 and the F model that has the much more powerful engines,
• 34:03
  and it could probably go Mach three, but it take all the pain off the airplane.
• 34:07
  It's been done a few times, but the F-14,
• 34:10
  you know, is also a good fast airplane.
• 34:13
  So 2.25, which is the stated max for the Raptor
• 34:18
  to try to not burn off all the stealth coatings.
• 34:22
  It's still pretty fast.
• 34:23
  And if you can get up to mock two and you can be up around 55,000ft,
• 34:28
  you put so much kinetic and potential energy
• 34:31
  on the missile before it even leaves the rail,
• 34:34
  that you super extend the range and reason.
• 34:37
  Having to have much bigger missile, expensive missile.
• 34:40
  Although of course we're working on that. Yeah, we're working on those.
• 34:43
  And they're designed to be able to fit in both the F-35 and the F-22 weapons base.
• 34:48
  But, you know, the the fighter pilots kind of learned the lesson from the F-4
• 34:53
  when they didn't put a gun in it
• 34:54
  because they thought missile is going to do the job.
• 34:56
  And they didn't forget that lesson.
• 34:57
  And so they put an internal Gatling gun into the F-22.
• 35:02
  And to me at the time, because the technology had improved
• 35:05
  so much, I thought, man, that's a lot of weight.
• 35:09
  And why are we doing that still?
• 35:12
  Because you're you got $22 billion of investments
• 35:15
  to have this kind of stealth, most stealthy thing ever built,
• 35:19
  and you're going to throw all that away
• 35:22
  that you have
• 35:22
  no business getting into a within range, you know, dogfight.
• 35:26
  But I think they're thinking was we want the hedge on the bet regardless.
• 35:32
  Yeah.
• 35:32
  But that's certainly not where it's designed to operate.
• 35:35
  And when it operates in BVR mode, nobody ever sees it.
• 35:38
  It's just visual range for those. Yeah.
• 35:41
  Thank you.
• 35:42
  And then the W VR within visual range where you do your dogfighting.
• 35:47
  It's not optimized for that though.
• 35:49
  The thrust vectoring helps it do some really Frankie turns.
• 35:53
  Yeah yeah.
• 35:55
  But yeah like you said, when the Hornet Super Hornet, you could
• 35:57
  you could do some pretty amazing stuff
• 35:59
  because of the controllability of those canton twin tails.
• 36:03
  So yeah, I'm, I was very impressed by the early models of it.
• 36:06
  I never got to fly the Super Hornet.
• 36:08
  Did you ever get the earlier one
• 36:09
  before you went to the Super Hornet or the Super Hornet?
• 36:12
  I'm trying to think,
• 36:14
  no, I went right to the Super Hornet.
• 36:17
  In the rag
• 36:18
  in the Fleet Replacement Squadron, where you train on your fleet aircraft.
• 36:22
  They have the Charlie models, you know, Alpha through.
• 36:25
  Yeah.
• 36:26
  Delta Air, and then the E and FS, and I was trying to remember.
• 36:29
  Did I fly in any of the, the, the
• 36:31
  the regular Old Hornets, but no, just, just the Super Hornet.
• 36:36
  Well certainly there
• 36:37
  they have the same F-18 designation, but they are very different things.
• 36:42
  As you know, it's much bigger.
• 36:43
  And in fact, the if 17, which was a competitor to the Y of 16
• 36:47
  back in the lightweight fight or fly off is super small, but it has that shape.
• 36:52
  You know, it was a lightweight fighter.
• 36:54
  So it was it was being designed to compete for that Air Force requirement.
• 36:58
  But the derivative of that scaled up to be the original F-18 Hornet, a model.
• 37:04
  And then of course, that got scaled up much, much greater
• 37:07
  to make the Super Hornet.
• 37:09
  You know, the the Lex is much larger.
• 37:11
  You have bigger weighing more fuel.
• 37:14
  I think it's about 33% larger.
• 37:17
  Yeah, it's it's impressively bigger.
• 37:20
  But my gosh, what a good airplane that's been for the Navy.
• 37:23
  It's such a great not just a dogfight or a ship defense,
• 37:28
  but it's a great multi-role airplane and can carry a lot of tonnage out there
• 37:32
  to, to the space.
• 37:34
  So yeah, it's,
• 37:36
  it's it was really a pleasure having the career I did.
• 37:40
  It was like a dream come true.
• 37:42
  I feel very lucky.
• 37:44
  Blessed even, because I know,
• 37:47
  I, you know, I, I have a strong belief in God, and,
• 37:52
  I know God saved my life a few times when I shouldn't come back.
• 37:55
  One times he changed the laws of physics, I believe,
• 37:58
  to keep me from hitting the ground.
• 38:00
  When I was an instructor
• 38:01
  pilot with that student that was having trouble in the left seat.
• 38:04
  Let's hear about that one.
• 38:06
  Yeah.
• 38:06
  So we're out on a range over the North Sea,
• 38:10
  and we had some RAF target out there on a, on a range where we could,
• 38:14
  you know, do the B2 33 practice bombs on a little RAF raft out there
• 38:18
  and you had to acquire it by, by the ground mapping
• 38:21
  radar in the turn to come on to it because you can't see anything.
• 38:24
  And of course the, the North Sea on a typical day there
• 38:29
  and the sky were indiscernible, same color visibility.
• 38:33
  You're not going to discern a horizon out there.
• 38:35
  So I really stressed before we went into that turn.
• 38:39
  Okay, I'm going to go in the radar scope.
• 38:41
  But you fly this on instruments, you do an instrument turn no more than
• 38:44
  six degrees, bank
• 38:47
  until I get the
• 38:48
  target locked on at about 45 degrees before we finish the turn.
• 38:51
  And then you can follow the guidance to on the heading to.
• 38:56
  And then you can start letting yourself down.
• 38:57
  But don't go below 1000ft.
• 38:58
  Don't go about six degrees. Bank.
• 39:00
  Do not look outside.
• 39:01
  Look directly on this or flight as an instrument turn.
• 39:05
  So I get down in the radar, which I'm not.
• 39:07
  You know, I wasn't a Wiseau ever.
• 39:08
  So I'm working all the manual knobs and all.
• 39:12
  I'm trying to figure out where this target is and I'm not seeing anything.
• 39:15
  And suddenly the hair on the back of my neck
• 39:17
  stands up and I think, get out of the hood, you know what's going on?
• 39:20
  And I look over and he's got us at 135 degrees, bank
• 39:25
  in about 40 degrees, nose low,
• 39:27
  and we're well below 1000ft now, and we're scorching toward the ocean.
• 39:32
  And he's looking over the center being, you know, where the gull wing canopies
• 39:36
  trying to see the target. Oh, Lord.
• 39:38
  And I just go, I got it, I got it, I got it, and I took over the airplane.
• 39:41
  I reached across him, I threw the wings all the way forward.
• 39:44
  I put it in full afterburner after I got the nose headed back up.
• 39:48
  So we're, we're we're cooking in full afterburner
• 39:51
  and I've got the stick all the way back.
• 39:53
  We went to 7.3 G's, which is the max it could do.
• 39:57
  And I'm
• 39:57
  right against the stops with both hands just to hold it completely like this.
• 40:01
  And I looked at the radar altimeter.
• 40:03
  And we're going through 50ft very fast.
• 40:05
  And I just knew when you'll have 50ft, five zero feet.
• 40:11
  The nose is pointed up.
• 40:12
  But I just knew we didn't.
• 40:14
  We weren't going to make it. Yeah.
• 40:16
  And so literally
• 40:18
  I mean, we were certainly too low to eject.
• 40:20
  And we were in a bad attitude to try to eject the capsule.
• 40:23
  Out of the car. There was no time. Yeah.
• 40:25
  So I just closed my eyes at that point and thought, okay.
• 40:29
  Well comes. Here, here comes the explosion.
• 40:32
  You know, we're going to get vaporized.
• 40:35
  And then I counted potatoes
• 40:37
  and about 5 or 6 potatoes later we hadn't exploded.
• 40:41
  And of course, I'm holding the stick perfectly centered with both hands.
• 40:45
  And I opened my eyes and we're climbing up through,
• 40:48
  you know, several thousand feet
• 40:51
  at 60 degrees, nose up at that point in full afterburner.
• 40:55
  And it shook me to
• 40:56
  my core because, you know, we almost died that day.
• 41:01
  And yet, for some reason, from some unknown source,
• 41:06
  if I hadn't gotten my head out of the radar, I
• 41:07
  no wonder I wouldn't find anything in the radar.
• 41:09
  Looking out there at the space, you know, not on the ocean,
• 41:13
  but yeah, it was a it was a big lesson for me.
• 41:17
  And I had a few more instances, including the one we talked
• 41:20
  about a little bit, where the F-16 blew up on the ramp.
• 41:22
  That could have taken my life that day.
• 41:25
  But in every case, somehow I've been rescued or I've been saved.
• 41:30
  And like I said, I don't see
• 41:32
  as an aerospace engineer and knowing the performance
• 41:35
  capability of the F-111, I didn't see any way
• 41:38
  we were not going to hit the ocean that day.
• 41:40
  But we didn't.
• 41:41
  We didn't hit anything that we didn't even bend the tail cones.
• 41:44
  We felt nothing.
• 41:45
  We just got lifted up.
• 41:49
  So yeah, my I wouldn't be here today if it hadn't been
• 41:52
  for a lot of intervention, I think from the higher power.
• 41:56
  And, and I feel very thankful for that because
• 42:00
  even though I got a lot of injuries and I'm 100% permanent
• 42:03
  and total disabled because of all the lung damage,
• 42:06
  but I get stem cells for that.
• 42:08
  I have to pay for amount of pocket, but I go to Panama and get stem
• 42:11
  cell injections, mesenchymal stem cells, which are adult stem cells
• 42:14
  undifferentiated that are in the umbilical cord.
• 42:18
  So they're created during pregnancy and they're very powerful.
• 42:22
  We've all got those stem cells. We're all born with them.
• 42:24
  But you know, I'm 70 years old now.
• 42:26
  How good you think my ones that I was born with are they get worn out.
• 42:30
  They're not as effective.
• 42:31
  But these these new ones come in and they basically transfer mitochondria
• 42:35
  and get your cells working and do all this healing.
• 42:38
  It's not permanent
• 42:39
  because the things that are inorganic can't be removed without me trading lungs.
• 42:44
  You don't have a lung transplant.
• 42:45
  Not been willing to do that.
• 42:47
  You know I might be sorry to might be worth
• 42:49
  talk about that story because I mean that was quite fascinating as well.
• 42:53
  I have I have some comments I want to make on it just based off of
• 42:57
  my experience in the jet.
• 42:58
  But, would you mind sharing what happened there?
• 43:02
  Oh, sure. Yeah. So I'm.
• 43:04
  How about Eglin Air Force Base?
• 43:06
  And I'm getting ready to take off for a test mission in F-16.
• 43:10
  It's single seat, ready to go.
• 43:12
  Everything's on time.
• 43:13
  Coochie pulls the chalks.
• 43:15
  I start out, I make a right turn.
• 43:17
  Then I make a left turn onto the parallel taxiway, heading down to the runway.
• 43:22
  And a few feet after I made that left hand
• 43:24
  turn, just taxing the airplane along an idle.
• 43:28
  Suddenly there's this massive explosion sound and it can be in the cockpit.
• 43:33
  And I didn't know what it was.
• 43:35
  It didn't appear to be the engine at the time, but immediately, you know,
• 43:38
  I put the brakes on, stop the aircraft stopped, cocked the throttle,
• 43:43
  because if it was the engine, I didn't want further things to happen.
• 43:46
  And then I see a flame pool developing from my right side, and it's
• 43:51
  enveloping the airplane from the wheel well forward, and it's spreading.
• 43:55
  So I go to
• 43:58
  raise the canopy to, to get out manually because I could get out on the other side.
• 44:03
  Then there wasn't a flame there yet,
• 44:05
  and the canopy jammed and just stopped and canopy runs on battery power.
• 44:10
  What I didn't know at the time, but later found out it was the main battery
• 44:14
  in the aircraft, which is the right wheel that exploded
• 44:17
  and it severed a bunch of lines in there, and that's what was leaking down
• 44:21
  and creating the accelerant from the fire.
• 44:22
  It was an electrical fire at first, but I had no electrical power
• 44:26
  now, especially after I shut down the main engine, there's nothing now.
• 44:29
  And the canopy stopped.
• 44:31
  And then I went to manually turn this crank where you could try to crank it up
• 44:34
  and took 273 turns to get it all the way up.
• 44:37
  And I got about 5 or 6 turns into it and suddenly it wouldn't turn anymore.
• 44:42
  I mean, I could not, even with both hands, force it to get any higher.
• 44:46
  So the canopy is about that far up off the rail.
• 44:49
  And when the canopies jettison, the rocket motors are in the front,
• 44:52
  but they kind of depend on the plate that it's against to help
• 44:55
  accelerate it up, because you get that blast feedback.
• 44:59
  And I'm thinking, I probably couldn't
• 45:01
  even jettison this canopy and not have it just come right down on top of my head.
• 45:05
  So, and well, there's no canopy bow in that 16. Right?
• 45:08
  So, you know, when you first told the story to me,
• 45:10
  I was thinking in my head like I'd almost prefer to have,
• 45:14
  you know, no canopy or have it completely closed,
• 45:16
  because if it was completely closed, I would feel some confidence
• 45:19
  that I could eject.
• 45:20
  But if it's at some weird angle, you know, is it going to blow off?
• 45:24
  Yeah. In our system, they break through the canopy.
• 45:27
  Yeah. We don't have that.
• 45:28
  Yeah, but, you know, if it's not in the right position or,
• 45:31
  you know, you can basically just slam into it, right.
• 45:34
  And it doesn't break.
• 45:35
  And that's no way to know where to go.
• 45:37
  Yeah. For sure.
• 45:39
  So, you know, I'm making the real time decision.
• 45:41
  What do I do now?
• 45:43
  And I didn't want to attempt a zero zero ground ejection at that point because,
• 45:47
  you know, oftentimes you come down in the in the fire.
• 45:51
  So much. Yeah, I can go wrong there.
• 45:53
  And and plus, you know,
• 45:54
  that probably would have hurt my back enough not to be able to fly anymore.
• 45:58
  Who knows what.
• 45:59
  But all this is going through my mind.
• 46:01
  And fortunately my crew chief saw
• 46:04
  what was happening, and I saw him reach down in his toolbox.
• 46:07
  He got a speed handling and put this special bit
• 46:09
  that goes into the outside for emergency egress, and he comes
• 46:13
  sprinting like he's trying to win some kind of Olympic event.
• 46:18
  And the dude was flying.
• 46:20
  He was going so fast.
• 46:21
  He was running as hard as he could run.
• 46:23
  And as he got close to the airplane, he literally leaped up into the air
• 46:26
  because it's quite a bit over the ground in the airplane sitting up there,
• 46:29
  and he managed to get his left hand between the canopy and the rail.
• 46:34
  That's probably at ten feet.
• 46:36
  I mean, it's no joke. It's not like the roof.
• 46:39
  Trying to jump up and grab a basketball now,
• 46:42
  but he got his hand on there and had enough strength to do a one
• 46:45
  arm pull up to get
• 46:46
  where he could take the speed handle and jam it into the emergency egress board
• 46:50
  and cranked it one handed while he held his whole body weight up.
• 46:54
  And of course, you can imagine the adrenaline he's spending to do that.
• 46:58
  And the flames are going bigger all the time.
• 47:00
  He doesn't know if the Jets going to blow up. Well, he doesn't know.
• 47:02
  You know.
• 47:02
  He doesn't know. It put himself in harm's way.
• 47:05
  But as I see he's being successful in the the canopy, the what he was doing,
• 47:09
  it was coming up faster than it ever came up on its electric motor.
• 47:14
  So I quickly saved the seat on strapped and got ready to do my ground egress.
• 47:19
  And on the F-16, because the canopy, you know,
• 47:22
  you have the body bowing out quite a bit when you come over the side
• 47:25
  and you throw yourself over the side and you're holding on to the rail,
• 47:28
  you have to wait because your feet will go up under that
• 47:30
  and you don't want to let go then because you'll come down on your tailbone.
• 47:33
  So you let your feet come back under you, then you let go.
• 47:35
  And I mean, we practice this, but I never had to do it for real until that day.
• 47:40
  And I got ready to run. But I'm looking.
• 47:41
  Where is my guy?
• 47:42
  He's laying on the ground and the flames are getting closer to him,
• 47:45
  so I have to reach down and pick him up, do the fireman's carry,
• 47:49
  and he's dragging his toes because he's got nothing.
• 47:52
  He's burned up.
• 47:53
  He couldn't even he couldn't even get up on his own.
• 47:56
  So he saved me.
• 47:57
  And then I had to save him.
• 47:58
  And we got we got away from the aircraft.
• 48:01
  And by that time, of course, the tower,
• 48:02
  even though I couldn't get a radio call out,
• 48:04
  they've seen the burning aircraft on the ramp and they,
• 48:07
  you know, they rolled the fire engines and the ambulances.
• 48:11
  And when we when we got up there
• 48:13
  a little ways away, a safe distance from the airplane,
• 48:16
  the fire trucks were already on there and they're spraying it down.
• 48:20
  I think they saved the jet and rebuilt it later.
• 48:22
  They put him in one ambulance and put me in a different one.
• 48:25
  And then I never saw the guy again.
• 48:27
  Really? Yeah.
• 48:28
  I mean, to think of what he did that day and the human courage.
• 48:33
  It took the determination.
• 48:35
  But what he did saved my life.
• 48:38
  But what I what happened is, of course, when you see fire,
• 48:41
  you're trained to turn off the oxygen regulator in the cockpit,
• 48:45
  because otherwise, you know, you got this flame hazard because oxygen
• 48:49
  will really accelerate the fire if it gets in the cockpit.
• 48:52
  So I turned off my oxygen, breathing what's coming in through the canopy.
• 48:56
  Of course, my EPO, which runs on hydrazine,
• 48:59
  which is a very deadly thing, and it's got a very high
• 49:03
  percentage of ammonia in its exhaust, which is very bad for your lungs.
• 49:07
  Well, that has coming because there's a right quartering tailwind.
• 49:09
  It's bringing it right in the cockpit because it's open just enough.
• 49:12
  So I got that I got all this other burning soot stuff coming in and I'm.
• 49:17
  There fiberglass.
• 49:19
  There's fiberglass, there's whatever the hoses are made of.
• 49:21
  There's rubber.
• 49:22
  There's all kinds of compounds. There's carbon fiber.
• 49:25
  It's a nasty thing. It's like.
• 49:27
  It's like I was in a burn pit, but I'm sitting in the middle of it.
• 49:30
  Yeah, I was okay for a while, but at the slowly started making my lungs,
• 49:36
  worse and worse.
• 49:37
  So the first thing that showed up when the docs was bronchiectasis,
• 49:43
  that's a narrowing of the bronchial tubes.
• 49:46
  Later asthma showed up.
• 49:47
  And then I actually had pulmonary sarcoidosis even before I retired.
• 49:52
  But the docs missed it.
• 49:53
  They misdiagnosed it.
• 49:55
  They saw the swollen lymph nodes, the nodes in my lungs,
• 49:59
  and they thought it was an infomercial, which was a cancer.
• 50:02
  They ruled out lymphoma, but they didn't have a second diagnosis,
• 50:06
  so they just called it reactive airway disease.
• 50:08
  But clearly, from what I knew later on in 2012, when they finally figured out
• 50:12
  what I really had was pulmonary sarcoidosis.
• 50:14
  And as I mentioned to you, a lot of the first responders
• 50:17
  on nine over 11 that went into the burning rubble,
• 50:19
  they developed this for all the same reasons,
• 50:22
  and many of them died and they founded an autopsy.
• 50:25
  Others lived for a while and were being treated, but died anyway.
• 50:29
  And then some were living with it,
• 50:32
  as I have been so
• 50:35
  very fortunate to still be alive.
• 50:38
  But it did take me eventually out of flying,
• 50:41
  and I was on medical waivers for a long time, but I was working
• 50:46
  later.
• 50:46
  I was I was the F-22 program manager, and then I was
• 50:53
  reassigned to the lab to do directed energy weapons.
• 50:56
  I was working for the secretary of the Air Force for 1-1 priority national team.
• 51:01
  I was leading a national team, and I had enough endurance to get through all that.
• 51:05
  But one day the docs came in and said, well,
• 51:07
  we've hit the limit of what we can put you on medical waivers for us.
• 51:10
  So either going to have an Be and you'll be out immediately.
• 51:13
  But we know you're working
• 51:14
  for the secretary of the Air Force right now in a special program.
• 51:17
  So what I'd recommend is go ahead and do a voluntary retirement,
• 51:20
  and you can get another year to finish that program.
• 51:23
  And that'll stop the med process.
• 51:26
  And I said that's a good choice. So I did that.
• 51:29
  I turned down my promotion to general,
• 51:33
  because my health was deteriorating.
• 51:36
  So anyway, that's how I got out.
• 51:38
  And then I did consulting for another 20 years after that, taught
• 51:42
  directed energy weapons, helped develop the ones who got now
• 51:45
  even worked with the Navy on the ship based ones.
• 51:47
  Yeah.
• 51:47
  And, of course, they've been employed now in the Iran, in the Gulf out there.
• 51:53
  And, that's really good because we we had great excitement.
• 51:56
  I think the Navy even has great excitement about it, especially in nuclear
• 52:00
  powered ships of the future will have enough electricity.
• 52:04
  When I got into this, the lab was doing only chemical based lasers.
• 52:08
  So they had chemical oxygen, iodine laser for the 747, the airborne laser testbed.
• 52:15
  And they were thinking, you know, the Air Force by like 20 or 30 of these.
• 52:19
  And and I said, I don't see it for logistics reasons.
• 52:23
  I don't see it as a war fighter because the chemicals are deadly.
• 52:26
  Then you got to have special places where you're going to land and refuel them.
• 52:30
  With these chemicals, people can die just dealing with the chemicals.
• 52:34
  If the chemicals start leaking in the airplane,
• 52:36
  everybody on board is going to die.
• 52:37
  If the airplane crashes, anybody within a five mile radius is going to die.
• 52:41
  So I said, I just, I think, okay, great.
• 52:44
  That will have a over a megawatt of laser energy on a, on an ice beam
• 52:49
  target to see if it's even possible to burn through the missile case and boost
• 52:54
  and have it blow up and the warhead come down in their territory
• 52:58
  instead of getting ours.
• 52:59
  That was a worthy thing to look.
• 53:00
  But I said I didn't see a fleet of these ever.
• 53:03
  And in fact, they didn't.
• 53:04
  After it had a successful test program.
• 53:06
  And think under Obama, he ordered the airplane to go to the boneyard.
• 53:10
  And then because Putin wanted it cut up in little pieces,
• 53:13
  they sort it up in a little pieces.
• 53:14
  So they just destroyed everything there so it couldn't be ever put back together.
• 53:18
  So what's the alternative to chemical.
• 53:21
  Fiber laser?
• 53:22
  A fiber.
• 53:22
  Fiber laser. Fiber laser system.
• 53:26
  Fiber lasers have, you know, like fiber optics.
• 53:29
  There's cladding on the inside outer perimeter
• 53:31
  on the inside that lets light channel through in the curves.
• 53:36
  A fiber laser has an inner cladding as well,
• 53:39
  a core that reacts and produces the the laser energy.
• 53:43
  And in fact,
• 53:45
  all the atoms start getting coherent in the fire when you call up the fiber.
• 53:50
  And anyway, the everybody laughed at me.
• 53:53
  The the career laser physicist said, no way that's ever going to work,
• 53:59
  because Southampton University in the UK was the leading
• 54:03
  academic authority on fiber laser, and they published a maximum theoretical
• 54:07
  for a fiber laser that was just not useful.
• 54:11
  But I
• 54:13
  my concept was but I think we can get that to higher levels.
• 54:18
  And if we gang them up, if you take a bundle of those fibers,
• 54:21
  say 50 or 100 or however big you want to make the laser,
• 54:24
  you've got redundancy in the system because individual fibers can go out
• 54:27
  and it's like losing pickles, pixels on a screen.
• 54:31
  You know, you, you've got a a backup for that.
• 54:34
  Yeah.
• 54:35
  And so I started I had a little seed money, and I started a project with a guy
• 54:39
  that actually used to work for Kelly Johnson in the original skunkworks,
• 54:42
  and he worked on the F-117 stealth fighter from Lockheed skunkworks.
• 54:47
  And one of the problems with the stealth fighter had been it had a rank up front.
• 54:51
  You've probably seen the front of it.
• 54:53
  There are those four tubes. Yeah,
• 54:56
  p total for
• 54:58
  measuring air data, which was critical
• 55:00
  because the aircraft needed a lot of feedback control
• 55:02
  because it was the hopeless diamond shape, not a good aerodynamic airplane.
• 55:06
  But, but they used a derivative of the F-16 flyby
• 55:10
  or flight control system to make it work.
• 55:12
  Anyway, that accounted for about 90% of the radar signature it had.
• 55:18
  And so he thought, well, if we could do
• 55:23
  like a pulse gated laser
• 55:25
  and measure random dust particles in the atmosphere,
• 55:29
  we can determine airspeed without the need for those.
• 55:32
  Interesting.
• 55:33
  And they gave him an L 1011
• 55:36
  Lockheed L 1011 to instrument up and go try it.
• 55:40
  And he used a gas laser like CO2 laser
• 55:43
  just for trying to look at principles to see if that worked.
• 55:47
  And in fact, it did work.
• 55:48
  It worked extremely accuracy accurate.
• 55:52
  But then,
• 55:52
  you know, there was no way to fit all that into,
• 55:56
  two and a half, 117.
• 55:59
  But he left.
• 55:59
  Lockheed started his own company called Optical Air Data Systems,
• 56:04
  and when I found him, I came with a proposition
• 56:08
  because he was already working fiber lasers
• 56:11
  to try to get that capability in a smaller package.
• 56:16
  And so I gave him some seed money in about 6 to 8 months.
• 56:20
  He came up with a three loops, one feeds the next, feeds the next.
• 56:25
  And after those six months
• 56:27
  of trials in the lab, we were able to exceed
• 56:31
  the theoretical maximum for a single fiber by over ten.
• 56:36
  Oh, excuse me, 100 fold.
• 56:37
  So yeah, two orders of magnitude.
• 56:41
  And that finally got the laser physicist at at
• 56:45
  Wright-Patterson interested to come down and do a double check on all this.
• 56:49
  And then that started,
• 56:52
  the era of this.
• 56:53
  I said, here's what's good about it.
• 56:55
  All you have to feed it is electricity.
• 56:58
  And you can store up the electricity in batteries.
• 57:00
  If you don't have a generator big enough,
• 57:02
  if it's ground based, then you could probably generate it all.
• 57:05
  If it's in a vehicle like a tank or a track vehicle or something,
• 57:10
  they've got big,
• 57:11
  you know, diesel or even turbine engines that can generate a lot of stuff.
• 57:15
  So the concept was pretty solid.
• 57:18
  And eventually industry started moving in that direction.
• 57:22
  And now everybody that's doing lasers is doing fiber lasers.
• 57:26
  And they've made incredible strides.
• 57:29
  I was working with the Navy on, you know, they were trying
• 57:32
  to get to a 500 kilowatt laser.
• 57:36
  And it was going to be a coherently formed,
• 57:41
  you know, how just to explain this for a little bit,
• 57:44
  if you want to phase all those different fiber bundles,
• 57:48
  then you remember how, I don't know, you're not old enough to remember the days
• 57:53
  when radios drifted off the station constantly having to bring them back.
• 57:57
  I'm not.
• 57:58
  That was solved with a circuitry called superheterodyne feedback loop,
• 58:03
  and they were able to stabilize so that you could,
• 58:05
  you know, digitally go to a radio station.
• 58:07
  And they never drifted off.
• 58:08
  And you can apply those same principles to controlling the phasing of the light.
• 58:15
  And that was something I thought about a lot earlier on.
• 58:19
  And finally, it was
• 58:21
  MIT Lincoln Lab that started super like putting some effort in.
• 58:25
  I funded a project to see if we could do it with 6 or 7 fibers,
• 58:29
  and that was successful.
• 58:30
  And then that's been scaled up.
• 58:32
  So now you have coherently combined, which is is really good.
• 58:36
  That's probably the best mean quality you can get,
• 58:38
  but we can incoherently combine them through
• 58:41
  multi-layer multilayer dielectric in the optic loop.
• 58:46
  And what it does is it doesn't make it fully coherent,
• 58:49
  but it brings the beams together.
• 58:50
  So it's almost that much beam quality.
• 58:53
  So the spectral beam combining, which is what that's called,
• 58:58
  is a method that preserves all the redundancy
• 59:03
  of each of those individual fibers.
• 59:05
  Whereas the coherent
• 59:06
  if your coherent combiner goes out, your whole laser goes down, you know.
• 59:09
  So anyway, they're kind of playing around with both of those.
• 59:13
  And Navy's looking at both those capabilities.
• 59:15
  The ones that are out in the field now on ships are all,
• 59:20
  spectral beam combined lasers, but they're still working
• 59:23
  with MIT Lincoln Labs to come up with an even greater power.
• 59:27
  And I worked with the chief of Naval operations at that time.
• 59:31
  He really became a proponent of it because he could see the value.
• 59:35
  You know, you look at these 30,000, $20,000 drones
• 59:39
  at their firing at the Navy, and you spend a 2 or $3 million
• 59:44
  missile out of a vertical launch tube that can't be replenished at sea.
• 59:48
  It's sort of a bad cost trade, but take you
• 59:51
  about $3.50 of electricity to take the take the drones out.
• 59:55
  Yeah, unlimited ammunition, essentially.
• 59:57
  Limited magazine.
• 59:58
  Is that so important where, you know, maybe just to put a bow on the laser side,
• 1:00:03
  where do you where do you see this technology capping out in the near term?
• 1:00:08
  You know, as far as,
• 1:00:11
  the power of the system, the size of the systems.
• 1:00:13
  Are we on a trend where these are continue to get smaller
• 1:00:18
  and more powerful, or do you think we are in the world?
• 1:00:21
  What's nice when you get big industry involved and they start working
• 1:00:24
  with subcontractors for the various components
• 1:00:27
  they started going after overall efficiency of the laser.
• 1:00:30
  Now lasers were at 5% efficiency from wall plug to laser power output.
• 1:00:36
  We got it to 15% with those early fiber laser things, which was groundbreaking.
• 1:00:41
  Yeah, but the last I checked, it's at 49% now.
• 1:00:45
  Oh, wow.
• 1:00:46
  You still got a lot of waste heat.
• 1:00:48
  You got to do something with it.
• 1:00:49
  But the beauty of the Navy is they got seawater.
• 1:00:52
  They can circulate through as a as a heat absorber.
• 1:00:54
  So. Yeah.
• 1:00:56
  Yeah.
• 1:00:56
  I'm really excited about the Navy solution to put it on an airplane.
• 1:00:59
  It's still challenging, but we're getting closer.
• 1:01:01
  Maybe the f 47 will have it.
• 1:01:03
  I don't know, because I'm not read into that program.
• 1:01:06
  They keep.
• 1:01:07
  You always hear rumors about that being a technology that goes on even,
• 1:01:11
  you know, perhaps not not to be shooting, you know, be a 40,000ft in the
• 1:01:16
  to shoot down or to shoot a building on the ground or an aircraft
• 1:01:20
  100 miles away, but even has like a close in defense system from other missiles.
• 1:01:24
  Exactly.
• 1:01:25
  I think that's that's our goal right now is a defensive capability,
• 1:01:29
  which would avoid, depending solely on electronic warfare means.
• 1:01:35
  And because they, they also kind of give you away if you're
• 1:01:38
  in a stealth airplane.
• 1:01:40
  So I don't know where that's going to go, but it's come a long way.
• 1:01:44
  And to see now if you talk to Lockheed
• 1:01:47
  or Boeing or Northrop Grumman, they're all doing fiber lasers.
• 1:01:51
  And and it's good to have competition there as well,
• 1:01:53
  because they're each trying to drive greater and greater efficiencies, more
• 1:01:57
  and more final power output, greater being quality.
• 1:02:00
  And the breakthroughs have been amazing.
• 1:02:02
  So it was tough teaching it because I kept having to update courses
• 1:02:05
  literally a few months away, and I have to go and update
• 1:02:07
  all my PowerPoint to give the latest and latest on the students.
• 1:02:11
  But the first course I developed for them, and I guess they had had some
• 1:02:16
  of the laser physicists trying to go out and teach warfighters about this.
• 1:02:19
  The problem
• 1:02:19
  is, the laser physicists have been in
• 1:02:21
  an academic kind of environment, almost their own life,
• 1:02:23
  and they're used to showing equations and improving their work
• 1:02:26
  with these equations.
• 1:02:28
  And you got guys, you know, like enlisted people that didn't have any of
• 1:02:30
  that kind of Stem education, science, technology,
• 1:02:35
  engineering and math.
• 1:02:36
  They don't have that.
• 1:02:37
  And a lot of the fighter pilots don't have that,
• 1:02:39
  don't need it to be a fighter pilot.
• 1:02:42
  So they finally realized because they just went over their heads
• 1:02:45
  and get them walk out of the room. So it wasn't effective.
• 1:02:47
  So they they knew that I had a background as a fighter pilot and a test pilot.
• 1:02:51
  So they finally asked me to stay on after I retired and helped them
• 1:02:57
  develop this and start developing courseware to teach the warfighters.
• 1:03:00
  So I made it very warfighter oriented and it was received very well.
• 1:03:04
  The first one we did was a classified course
• 1:03:08
  at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
• 1:03:12
  and they had a big classified auditorium,
• 1:03:15
  and it was filled with a lot of naval guys because,
• 1:03:18
  you know, they're going to school there and they're kind of captive audience.
• 1:03:20
  But we had army guys, we had airforce people.
• 1:03:23
  We had a lot of uniformed people in that group and the big stadium,
• 1:03:27
  auditoriums, style auditorium,
• 1:03:30
  and it was extremely well received.
• 1:03:33
  So then it just like continued like you got to keep doing this.
• 1:03:35
  So I did that for most of my retirement, keep building courses and teaching.
• 1:03:40
  Eventually they sent me over to the Centcom,
• 1:03:44
  and I went to Europe and I went to Africom, and I went to Indo Packham
• 1:03:50
  and we had a shorter course
• 1:03:52
  that's about like a 30 minute, but it would usually expand
• 1:03:54
  because the generals have a lot of questions.
• 1:03:56
  So a briefing then goes, we try to compress it.
• 1:03:59
  The course we did for
• 1:04:00
  the work was a four hour course, because that's about all you could absorb.
• 1:04:03
  And we have breaks in there, of course, but really enjoyed doing that.
• 1:04:07
  And I, I'm really thankful.
• 1:04:10
  I mean, my career is kind of weird because it took so many different turns.
• 1:04:16
  Well, jealous of in a lot of ways.
• 1:04:17
  I mean, you got to work on, you know,
• 1:04:19
  the very cutting edge technology, working with new programs
• 1:04:22
  in a lot of ways, that's where I envisioned myself going.
• 1:04:24
  If I had been able to succeed in getting into test pilot school,
• 1:04:27
  I necessarily failed.
• 1:04:28
  But I was injured during my application window, so I was, oh, medically,
• 1:04:33
  I was medically down and I needed to be in a flight status to apply in the Navy.
• 1:04:37
  And so I kind of missed my window.
• 1:04:40
  Which was a bummer.
• 1:04:40
  But you have made a good one, man, because I seen how your brain works.
• 1:04:43
  You've been a great test pilot. I think so.
• 1:04:45
  I think so, but, found another calling you could say.
• 1:04:49
  Yeah.
• 1:04:50
  I think we've established you have some aviation experience,
• 1:04:54
  some technical know how.
• 1:04:56
  Let's kind of switch gears here into into the world a little bit.
• 1:05:01
  I know you've had some experiences in the past,
• 1:05:03
  but what really kind of like said, all right,
• 1:05:05
  this is something I'm willing to share. And maybe you did.
• 1:05:07
  Maybe you shared it in your career in the past.
• 1:05:09
  Maybe no one listened.
• 1:05:11
  I don't know,
• 1:05:11
  maybe you can kind of give us some insight to without going into them yet.
• 1:05:15
  Just kind of like how you decided to start speaking about this.
• 1:05:19
  Yeah.
• 1:05:19
  Well, I, I certainly held my first encounter.
• 1:05:23
  To myself for nearly 45 years.
• 1:05:26
  And it was because the stigma, especially in the Air Force, was so bad
• 1:05:30
  and I was enjoying what I was doing, which we've just gone
• 1:05:33
  through in my second career after I retired from active duty.
• 1:05:37
  And because of that, I didn't want to take a chance.
• 1:05:39
  And certainly I wouldn't have taken a chance in real time back in 1980.
• 1:05:44
  Yeah, December 26th and 1980,
• 1:05:48
  because when you're in Personnel Reliability program,
• 1:05:52
  you're under like a psych care.
• 1:05:56
  If they have any thing, they want to get you out of there,
• 1:06:00
  then they they basically tell the psych a marking crazy and he's out.
• 1:06:03
  So it could have threatened my entire flying career,
• 1:06:06
  especially the stigma was so bad back then.
• 1:06:08
  So I didn't tell a soul.
• 1:06:10
  It's kind of thing though, that you, you don't forget.
• 1:06:13
  It's just to
• 1:06:16
  I don't know.
• 1:06:16
  It's a big ontological kind of shock.
• 1:06:19
  I mean we had to memorize because this was during the Cold War.
• 1:06:22
  We had to memorize every silhouette of every kind of rotorcraft
• 1:06:26
  and jet fighter or whatever, even transports for the Soviet Union.
• 1:06:31
  We had to know all the NATO aircraft, and we got tested on that regularly.
• 1:06:35
  So, you know,
• 1:06:37
  that was something that that certainly came into play
• 1:06:40
  when I'm trying to analyze this, this thing.
• 1:06:42
  But yeah, it was just the stigma. And,
• 1:06:46
  and I was still on a top secret even in my second career.
• 1:06:50
  And I was enjoying and thought it was important to keep doing what I'm doing.
• 1:06:54
  So it wasn't important enough to stop that work, to talk about it.
• 1:06:59
  So when you and I first talked, it was again, you kept it private.
• 1:07:04
  And you got me in the interview with the FBI.
• 1:07:06
  And they kept it private until recently.
• 1:07:08
  They contacted me under the president's order in mind, if we released this story,
• 1:07:12
  we can leave your name out.
• 1:07:13
  I said, yeah, you can.
• 1:07:14
  You can release it all now. So,
• 1:07:17
  it's been a gradual
• 1:07:19
  transition, but I think it's a very important topic.
• 1:07:23
  It's one that maybe not everybody still believes in.
• 1:07:26
  And I know not everybody has had an experience or close encounter.
• 1:07:30
  But when you do, and especially if you have an aerospace background,
• 1:07:34
  it really begins to get your mind chunking on how is it doing that?
• 1:07:38
  How does it perform what it's doing?
• 1:07:40
  Because it's certainly beyond any physics that we currently have as acknowledged.
• 1:07:45
  Not that maybe somebody knows,
• 1:07:48
  I don't know.
• 1:07:50
  But anyway, yeah, that's that's really why
• 1:07:52
  I kept it secret like most military pilots do.
• 1:07:56
  Yeah. And I was just doing some mental math while you were talking.
• 1:07:59
  You came to Americans for Safe Aerospace,
• 1:08:02
  may, I think 27th of 2023, which was about
• 1:08:07
  a month or so
• 1:08:08
  before I ended up testifying for Congress in July
• 1:08:12
  and of July 2023, and only months
• 1:08:16
  after that organization was formed.
• 1:08:19
  Yeah. Well, thank you.
• 1:08:21
  So thank you for coming forward for a while. And like you said, I agree.
• 1:08:24
  I think, you know, many pilots don't feel comfortable talking about this
• 1:08:28
  even today.
• 1:08:29
  What kind of triggered you to come forward though, you know, I mean,
• 1:08:33
  was there something you had saw in the news or
• 1:08:35
  did you just feel like I'm out of it now and I'm hearing about it?
• 1:08:39
  Maybe it's time. Exactly.
• 1:08:42
  I started to see sort of a momentum developing.
• 1:08:47
  I think that as people started coming forward
• 1:08:51
  that had been on the inside
• 1:08:54
  and particularly seeing David Greene come forward, what a brave soul he is.
• 1:08:59
  And of course, he interviewed with you on that,
• 1:09:01
  that same thing on the testimony in front of Congress.
• 1:09:03
  I thought, well, it is important to come forward, especially as a pilot.
• 1:09:08
  Now, I never had a near miss in flight like some of your,
• 1:09:14
  I guess, fellow
• 1:09:15
  aviators did, doing training on out over the Atlantic.
• 1:09:19
  But David Favors story
• 1:09:23
  really catalyzed a lot for me.
• 1:09:27
  It was he and you going in front of Congress.
• 1:09:31
  And that, I think, showed
• 1:09:35
  that pilots can and should tell what they've seen and experienced.
• 1:09:39
  And so since I finally fully retired,
• 1:09:43
  I thought, what have I got to lose?
• 1:09:47
  What am I what am I holding back for now?
• 1:09:49
  I'd say it's just years of thinking nobody could ever know.
• 1:09:52
  I can't even tell my wife.
• 1:09:53
  I just was afraid of what the consequences would be,
• 1:09:56
  because my aviation career was was very meaningful for me.
• 1:10:01
  In fact,
• 1:10:01
  there was never a time when I flew that I didn't have the conscious thought.
• 1:10:06
  I can't believe they actually paid me to do this.
• 1:10:08
  Yeah, when you're in a job like that
• 1:10:10
  and you feel like it's an important job for the nation,
• 1:10:13
  there's a service, there's this camaraderie, there's this whole,
• 1:10:16
  as you know, particularly as fighter
• 1:10:20
  pilots, there's this thing where your your lives are dependent on each other.
• 1:10:23
  And so your teammates and your formation, your, your teammates in whatever
• 1:10:29
  squadron or unit you're in, you form a bond that's like nothing else
• 1:10:33
  because you are putting yourself at risk at all times, even in training.
• 1:10:37
  And, you know, I lost almost 35, something like 33
• 1:10:43
  friends and colleagues during mostly during my test piloting days.
• 1:10:47
  So test piloting is very hard risk because there's unknown unknowns
• 1:10:51
  and you never know if you're going to encounter with them.
• 1:10:53
  You go after the known unknowns, but there's unknown unknowns
• 1:10:57
  because it's a very nonlinear environment
• 1:10:58
  in the atmosphere and supersonic and stuff, and people die.
• 1:11:03
  And I was willing to take that risk and advance on.
• 1:11:06
  But still,
• 1:11:08
  it's sobering.
• 1:11:10
  And you never really get over when those happen
• 1:11:14
  because there's such a deep friendship with camaraderie.
• 1:11:18
  Well, let's let's hear about your first experience.
• 1:11:21
  Yeah. So I was,
• 1:11:23
  I was the youngest guy in a go to F-111 at RAF Upper Heyford.
• 1:11:27
  It was kind of a trial thing.
• 1:11:29
  We went straight to the left seat.
• 1:11:31
  In the past, you had to go, you know, spend time in the right seat as a p.
• 1:11:35
  Oh, you needed at least two airplanes.
• 1:11:37
  You needed over like $1,500 one time.
• 1:11:39
  I didn't have any of that.
• 1:11:40
  And they decided because they were so short of aircraft
• 1:11:43
  commanders, to fly in the left seat and pilot the thing that they took
• 1:11:47
  a chance on guys coming right out of pilot training.
• 1:11:51
  And I relished the idea, in fact, so much so
• 1:11:56
  I did well in fighter lead in training, where you do
• 1:11:58
  a lot of your air to air gunnery and air to ground stuff in a T-38 B,
• 1:12:04
  which had a HUD, and you could release some BDU, small 25 pound
• 1:12:09
  practice bombs that weren't explosive.
• 1:12:13
  And because I had done well in that, they came to me and they said,
• 1:12:18
  we think of me, better to put you in an f 15, because I did.
• 1:12:21
  I didn't win Top Gun at my class.
• 1:12:23
  And and I thought about that, but
• 1:12:25
  it was going to take an educational delay or just a delay
• 1:12:28
  in casual status for a year before they can get me into training.
• 1:12:32
  And here I had this opportunity to go on.
• 1:12:34
  Airplane was the first variable sweep wing,
• 1:12:36
  automatic terrain following radar and stuff.
• 1:12:38
  And as I thought about it, I said it would be cool to fly the F-15,
• 1:12:41
  but I think the the technology and capabilities of this airplane
• 1:12:46
  are really speaking to my aerospace engineering background.
• 1:12:49
  So I turned down the F-15 and went straight on, then to my F
• 1:12:52
  for 111 assignment and never looked back and thought that was a wrong decision.
• 1:12:57
  Really enjoyed playing the airplane.
• 1:12:58
  We did a lot of low altitude both day and night
• 1:13:02
  on the terrain following radar and ground mapping.
• 1:13:05
  We didn't have an air to air radar with the crap.
• 1:13:07
  We could barely track our flight lead in weather,
• 1:13:10
  so it wasn't an air to air design machine the way the B model would have been.
• 1:13:14
  But for air to ground and the ground mapping
• 1:13:18
  and the terrain following radar system, the first of its kind.
• 1:13:22
  It was a beast.
• 1:13:23
  You could go super fast, you could go supersonic,
• 1:13:26
  you could exceed Mach 1.2, you know, at Treetop Heights.
• 1:13:30
  And it had 34,000 pounds of internal JPA.
• 1:13:35
  So it was really
• 1:13:36
  amazingly long legged airplane and fun to fly.
• 1:13:40
  So I'm doing my first year took about six months
• 1:13:44
  to be fully certified as a NATO combat pilot.
• 1:13:48
  And of course, you're flying in the I co, the International Civil
• 1:13:52
  Air Organization, a little bit different rules from the FAA.
• 1:13:56
  So you had to really get all of that down.
• 1:13:58
  But then once you're certified, you're also then sitting full alert.
• 1:14:03
  And our alert was called vector alert.
• 1:14:05
  And we set with B61 thermonuclear weapons
• 1:14:09
  loaded in the bomb bays and wings.
• 1:14:13
  And if the Cold War had turned into a hot war, those alert jets would be
• 1:14:17
  the first to go there and try to take out the most critical targets.
• 1:14:21
  It was a frightening kind of thought.
• 1:14:24
  Yeah, that time we could be scrambling.
• 1:14:26
  Fortunately, that never happened.
• 1:14:29
  But because I was the young guy, the youngest guy in the squadron, the newbie,
• 1:14:34
  I got the privilege of sitting on alerts
• 1:14:37
  that took up holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, so I did.
• 1:14:41
  I had done Thanksgiving, and now it's Christmas time.
• 1:14:43
  So I did the Christmas tour.
• 1:14:45
  I didn't I didn't never say no.
• 1:14:46
  It's like, okay, I got to pay my dues. Yeah.
• 1:14:50
  And so on December 26th, that Friday,
• 1:14:53
  the day after Christmas, was when our changeover was and
• 1:14:57
  I was coming back from the base, I took a little time to go
• 1:15:00
  see some of my squadron mates at the Jan D's bar on base.
• 1:15:06
  Talked to them for a little bit.
• 1:15:07
  Of course, I'm driving myself home in my Corvette, so I don't want to
• 1:15:11
  get a DUI, and that would also take me out of the cockpit.
• 1:15:15
  So I might have had half a beer if I had anything, but I just
• 1:15:17
  basically were singing some fighter pilot songs
• 1:15:19
  and just being glad to be out of there and and going home.
• 1:15:23
  So around 10:00 it's one more encounter came and it was I lived off base.
• 1:15:28
  There wasn't enough size on RAF Upper Heyford to have base housing
• 1:15:32
  for anybody but the like the commanders and stuff.
• 1:15:35
  And so the rest of us where we had kind of like a little America off
• 1:15:39
  base that we went to
• 1:15:41
  and it
• 1:15:42
  was not a long drive, maybe 15 minutes from the base,
• 1:15:45
  but this one road that I needed to take was very desolate woods on both sides.
• 1:15:50
  And there was a golf course on my right as I'm passing.
• 1:15:53
  And I knew about it because I'd gone out there
• 1:15:55
  with some of the guys and tried to play golf.
• 1:15:57
  Not very good at it, but anyway, I knew what was on the other side
• 1:16:00
  of this tree lines a golf course and I'm all alone.
• 1:16:05
  There's nobody coming at me.
• 1:16:06
  There's nobody behind me.
• 1:16:09
  And of course, I'm in a left hand drive
• 1:16:11
  American car and driving on British roads on the left hand side of the road.
• 1:16:15
  And so that took some getting used to. But
• 1:16:19
  as I'm
• 1:16:19
  driving, I noticed in my rearview mirror some really strange looking lights
• 1:16:24
  that are coming in very fast from behind me,
• 1:16:28
  and they come to beam me,
• 1:16:30
  and it just stops instantly
• 1:16:33
  and stops
• 1:16:36
  and I.
• 1:16:38
  I stopped my car and pulled off.
• 1:16:40
  I actually crossed the lane.
• 1:16:41
  There was nobody coming
• 1:16:42
  and pulled off on the right side of the road to be closest to the.
• 1:16:46
  There's some trees that are kind of like guard trees and most golf courses have.
• 1:16:49
  So if you hit a ball
• 1:16:50
  where and it doesn't hopefully get all the way through to the road.
• 1:16:55
  But this thing was hovering just above those trees
• 1:16:58
  and over the golf course.
• 1:17:01
  It was making no sound whatsoever at first.
• 1:17:03
  I just sat in the car and just looked at it through the windows.
• 1:17:06
  Roll the window down and
• 1:17:08
  I'm listening for sounds.
• 1:17:09
  I can't figure out what this thing is.
• 1:17:13
  So I get out of. My car. Any sounds at all?
• 1:17:15
  No, that was just silence.
• 1:17:17
  Just silence.
• 1:17:17
  Which was kind of weird. Then
• 1:17:22
  I stood out behind my Corvette, looking at it,
• 1:17:25
  and then something possessed me to start walking toward it.
• 1:17:29
  At this point, when I got to the closest
• 1:17:32
  I got, I would say it's about.
• 1:17:36
  150ft,
• 1:17:38
  and it appeared to be about 50 to 60ft long.
• 1:17:41
  It was sort of a triangular shape, but more rounded on the front,
• 1:17:45
  more angular on the back,
• 1:17:48
  but sort of around the bottom and side of this craft
• 1:17:52
  was all of this changing lights, different colors of light,
• 1:17:56
  and it was constantly morphing and changing.
• 1:18:00
  The lights.
• 1:18:01
  Yeah, it's like a field.
• 1:18:03
  Or was it like fixed lights?
• 1:18:04
  It wasn't like kind of.
• 1:18:06
  Yeah. No, it was more like a field.
• 1:18:08
  What if what it reminded me was a plasma or like, you know, where you have
• 1:18:12
  the aurora borealis or the aurora Astralis with the sun's electromagnetic energy
• 1:18:18
  coming in as plasma into our atmosphere and ionizing various gases.
• 1:18:24
  That's what it seemed to be like.
• 1:18:26
  But it wasn't, you know,
• 1:18:27
  there was no sound whatsoever, but it was just constantly changing.
• 1:18:30
  And it wasn't like there were little lights changing.
• 1:18:34
  So as I had started walking toward it,
• 1:18:38
  it began to descend.
• 1:18:41
  And then at first I'm thinking as a fighter pilot,
• 1:18:45
  maybe they'll let me take this thing for a spin.
• 1:18:48
  But I didn't know what it was.
• 1:18:50
  I didn't even know if there was any body in it or anything.
• 1:18:52
  I didn't see any occupants and I didn't.
• 1:18:54
  It didn't ever, ever actually land.
• 1:18:55
  At least I didn't stay around long enough.
• 1:18:58
  But as I'm having that thought and then all of a sudden
• 1:19:00
  I go, wait a minute, nobody has seen me out here.
• 1:19:02
  This is genuinely a UFO.
• 1:19:04
  It's not anything I can describe other than that.
• 1:19:07
  Or as we would now call it, a
• 1:19:10
  anomalous phenomenon.
• 1:19:12
  But in the day, the vernacular would have been UFO.
• 1:19:14
  And I knew it was death.
• 1:19:15
  In your career, if you told somebody you had a UFO sighting, especially
• 1:19:19
  in the situation I'm in.
• 1:19:21
  So I quickly decided, no, my best course of action.
• 1:19:25
  Because if that is some sort of ionization of the air through some sort of plasma,
• 1:19:30
  might not be so safe to get within close range of it.
• 1:19:35
  So from my own protection, both physically from whatever that is,
• 1:19:40
  as well as mentally for my career,
• 1:19:43
  I headed back to my car, got in and went on back home.
• 1:19:48
  I didn't tell a soul.
• 1:19:50
  43 years passed before I talked to you about it.
• 1:19:55
  And again, that was a private video
• 1:19:58
  that we had back and forth. But,
• 1:20:01
  yeah, I decided
• 1:20:03
  it was time to at least tell you,
• 1:20:06
  and I didn't have another sighting of any kind until
• 1:20:11
  about ten years later.
• 1:20:12
  It was 1990.
• 1:20:14
  Well, that's before you before you go into the next one,
• 1:20:16
  I want to just maybe pick a little bit on some questions here.
• 1:20:18
  Sure.
• 1:20:19
  When, when that those lights you saw in your rearview mirror approach did you.
• 1:20:24
  And went off over the golf course, did you interpret those lights
• 1:20:27
  that you saw in the back as being that plasma field,
• 1:20:30
  or do you think like some headlights, if you will, that were on front of that?
• 1:20:34
  Yeah.
• 1:20:34
  You know,
• 1:20:35
  I'm looking in the rearview mirror in the back glass through the Corvette.
• 1:20:38
  I wasn't looking directly at it, so I don't know what it was.
• 1:20:41
  I thought at first, maybe it's a helicopter because it stopped,
• 1:20:45
  but I never seen a helicopter
• 1:20:46
  with that kind of a display, and certainly not that kind of a shape.
• 1:20:49
  After I got out and really got a closer look at it.
• 1:20:52
  The color of it, the craft itself.
• 1:20:54
  It was just for, as I could tell, it was black because it was a dark night.
• 1:20:59
  It was 10:00 at night.
• 1:21:00
  It was colorless for for all except this perimeter.
• 1:21:05
  Constantly changing colors.
• 1:21:07
  Could you see any type of a cockpit?
• 1:21:09
  I couldn't, but I had a view, you know, looking up to it.
• 1:21:13
  And not from the direct front angle.
• 1:21:16
  I know there was there was a guy who went on the Earth
• 1:21:20
  files show that I saw sometime
• 1:21:24
  later as all this started to develop,
• 1:21:26
  and that was Linda moulton household show about UFO things.
• 1:21:30
  And he was stationary up Upper Heyford and he was telling of an encounter
• 1:21:35
  right over the weapons storage area while he was guarding some weapons.
• 1:21:38
  And he got to see a front on at eye level
• 1:21:42
  because he was on a little bit of a knoll.
• 1:21:44
  And as he's walking his century, he had a rifle sling rifle
• 1:21:47
  on his shoulder.
• 1:21:48
  He's guarding some weapons.
• 1:21:49
  Before they were going to put him, lock him in the store journey.
• 1:21:52
  So he's waiting on the weapons people to come and take the weapons,
• 1:21:55
  and he's just guarding them and he's going back and forth.
• 1:21:58
  It was a peaceful night.
• 1:21:59
  No problem.
• 1:21:59
  In one time he turns to go back the other way.
• 1:22:02
  And there's this thing just sitting there silent,
• 1:22:05
  and he described the same kind of changing colors under it,
• 1:22:08
  and he said that he could see through the front of it at that point.
• 1:22:11
  And there were these like, transparencies.
• 1:22:13
  But he didn't see any beings.
• 1:22:16
  But he said it appeared like the light inside was coming from the floor
• 1:22:20
  to the ceiling, as opposed from the ceiling down.
• 1:22:24
  And he had a pretty, pretty accurate description of it.
• 1:22:27
  And I was amazed because I had never heard that there was.
• 1:22:31
  He wasn't the only one on RF Upper Heyford that saw it.
• 1:22:34
  And so there have been a number of people that come, come
• 1:22:38
  and admit that.
• 1:22:39
  But he was using an alias name and an altered voice.
• 1:22:44
  And at the end of that show, Linda moulton Howell
• 1:22:47
  said, if anybody else has seen
• 1:22:50
  had an encounter in this time frame,
• 1:22:53
  please contact me on ProtonMail.
• 1:22:56
  I didn't have an account like that before, but I established one
• 1:23:00
  and I sent her a proton mail about it,
• 1:23:04
  and she then replied back and said,
• 1:23:09
  would would I mind if she had my phone number?
• 1:23:12
  So I gave her my phone number and then about a week or so passed
• 1:23:16
  and I happened to be in San Antonio, Texas,
• 1:23:21
  teaching directed energy weapons, and I'd spent all day teaching.
• 1:23:24
  I think I had two for our courses that Monday, and that money evening
• 1:23:28
  went on back in my hotel room.
• 1:23:30
  The phone rings and it's Linda moulton House,
• 1:23:32
  and we had about a two hour discussion, and she wanted me to come on Earth Files,
• 1:23:37
  and she would give me a disguised name and disguise my voice and all, and I said,
• 1:23:43
  I'm just not willing to do that at this point
• 1:23:45
  because this is, you know,
• 1:23:47
  I'm on a contract to do this work, and it takes a top secret clearance, and
• 1:23:51
  I don't want to risk any of that right now because it's an important work.
• 1:23:54
  And she she accepted that and never, never outed me.
• 1:24:00
  But yeah, I had told her about it because of her show,
• 1:24:04
  and she kind of logged in her show that RF Alconbury,
• 1:24:07
  which was a little north of Heyford, had had sightings that very night to
• 1:24:11
  and a similar and description in all of them.
• 1:24:13
  So and there was one other base and I remember the one might have been
• 1:24:16
  RAF Croughton, but there were several bases in the vicinity.
• 1:24:20
  And so this is more on the west side.
• 1:24:23
  Like RF
• 1:24:24
  Upper Heyford is 12 miles north of Oxford, England, whereas the forest incident
• 1:24:30
  that's happened at the same time is over on the East coast.
• 1:24:34
  And so I never knew about those
• 1:24:37
  until that came out publicly many years later.
• 1:24:40
  But with Linda moulton, how she was kind of putting it together,
• 1:24:43
  this was a bigger deal than just
• 1:24:45
  the rentals from Forest and Bentwaters Woodbridge bases.
• 1:24:49
  And of course, they were the that's the largest nuclear storage in all of NATO
• 1:24:53
  was there had been Warner's, Woodbridge, and they were over
• 1:24:57
  the weapons storage area just like it ended up in in the woods.
• 1:25:00
  So the guy at Upper Heyford said, you know, when the weapons guys
• 1:25:02
  got that first guy got there, he looks up and he goes, no, no, one of ours.
• 1:25:06
  He got in the truck and just left the guy out there alone.
• 1:25:08
  Yeah.
• 1:25:09
  And he never, you know, gotten he never abandoned his post.
• 1:25:12
  And then when the weapons guys came out and they put the weapons in the thing
• 1:25:15
  then moved and was hovering directly over him pretty low
• 1:25:19
  when they came out of the bunkers to put the weapons away.
• 1:25:23
  And then it never moved really fast.
• 1:25:25
  It just noiselessly moved away.
• 1:25:28
  But he saw it
• 1:25:29
  from underneath and he saw it from front almost directly.
• 1:25:32
  And I'm all level with it because of the berm he was on.
• 1:25:36
  So it was an interesting account in
• 1:25:41
  after having my count, I never talked that guy,
• 1:25:43
  and we never heard a word about there being an encounter on the base.
• 1:25:50
  So yeah, that that really intrigued my mind
• 1:25:53
  that this, this thing that we knew as Rendlesham Forest incident, a.
• 1:25:57
  Much. Bigger event, much bigger than,
• 1:26:00
  and why and the timing, who knows?
• 1:26:03
  Do you recall the color of the light underneath the craft?
• 1:26:07
  Yeah, I was, there.
• 1:26:09
  It was never, like, a solid color, but it was like these floating between,
• 1:26:15
  more purplish lights and sometimes a more reddish, light
• 1:26:18
  and yellowish, occasional green issue.
• 1:26:22
  It was quite a spectrum of colors and they were constantly doing differently.
• 1:26:27
  And so that's why
• 1:26:28
  I don't have any technical knowledge of the craft obviously.
• 1:26:31
  But in my mind, you know, because it had
• 1:26:35
  no visible means of propelling itself.
• 1:26:38
  I mean I've certainly seen a lot of AV eight B
• 1:26:41
  and even the F-35b do.
• 1:26:44
  They're hovering at the air show and that's quite loud.
• 1:26:46
  Yeah. That's what I was thinking.
• 1:26:47
  You can tell how that thing is working just by listening to it.
• 1:26:51
  And even a helicopter is very loud when the rotors are gone
• 1:26:54
  and there was no rotors, there was no rotor noise, there was just silence.
• 1:26:57
  That's what was so slumping about it.
• 1:26:59
  And that's why I'm thinking then how is it propelling itself?
• 1:27:02
  It has to be using a force that could repel
• 1:27:06
  the interact with and not not allow the gravity to bring it down.
• 1:27:11
  And you know, I was certainly aware that the electromagnetic force
• 1:27:16
  is ten to the 39th power greater than gravity.
• 1:27:19
  Yeah.
• 1:27:20
  So in my technical mind electromagnetic something.
• 1:27:26
  Could be the
• 1:27:27
  answer to how you could not have anti-gravity
• 1:27:30
  so much as just be able to resist gravity,
• 1:27:34
  maybe reduce your inertial mass.
• 1:27:37
  And, and then have it be able to
• 1:27:41
  propel you by a completely unknown
• 1:27:43
  to us, at least technically at that point.
• 1:27:47
  And I've thought a lot.
• 1:27:48
  Could that have been one of our craft that we reverse engineered.
• 1:27:53
  But then why would it be doing that particularly, you know
• 1:27:55
  appearing over bases and weapons storage areas.
• 1:27:59
  And why would we put, put it to be seen.
• 1:28:02
  I know where they test those kinds of things.
• 1:28:04
  If we do test those kinds of things and, and that's why we have that.
• 1:28:08
  Place not over golf courses.
• 1:28:09
  No it's not different golf courses.
• 1:28:12
  So yeah, I kind of quickly
• 1:28:14
  ruled out that that's not what it was.
• 1:28:17
  So what it is, who knows.
• 1:28:20
  It's anomalous.
• 1:28:21
  You might be interested to learn,
• 1:28:24
  you know,
• 1:28:24
  people are still seeing things of similar shapes, right?
• 1:28:29
  Black triangles, of course.
• 1:28:31
  And even I think it was 2022 or 2023,
• 1:28:35
  a pilot had a near midair with one of these black triangles.
• 1:28:40
  As he was leaving Johannesburg, South Africa. Wow.
• 1:28:45
  He was climbing through
• 1:28:47
  29,000ft, getting ready to level off.
• 1:28:49
  Sees a black triangle off his nose, basically looks to his copilot,
• 1:28:54
  looks at his sensors.
• 1:28:54
  It comes back into things right there.
• 1:28:56
  They have a 100ft pass.
• 1:28:59
  That's close. Yes.
• 1:29:01
  I mean, especially in a seven, three, seven style aircraft where the vertical,
• 1:29:04
  you know, stabilizers, you know.
• 1:29:07
  Was that 40ft?
• 1:29:08
  I don't know exactly, but,
• 1:29:09
  you know,
• 1:29:10
  there's not a lot of room for he actually braced
• 1:29:12
  because he thought it was going to hit their tail.
• 1:29:13
  Oh my God.
• 1:29:14
  Fully loaded passenger jet.
• 1:29:16
  And, he described the same thing as, as others have, as well as essentially
• 1:29:20
  what he interpreted, almost like a plasma field on the bottom of it, really.
• 1:29:25
  And others have described
• 1:29:26
  similarly as copilot SA as well, of course.
• 1:29:29
  And, they described it as gold.
• 1:29:31
  It was kind of a yellowish and gold and shimmering
• 1:29:34
  and almost gave the impression of like a reentry vehicle of sorts.
• 1:29:38
  So I asked a question about the color. Yeah.
• 1:29:40
  Unfortunately, I did not see color because it was just such a dark night.
• 1:29:44
  There were no lights out there on the golf course, and, well, this headlights.
• 1:29:47
  Of the field, if you will, the.
• 1:29:48
  Yeah.
• 1:29:49
  Like the colors that you described in that field.
• 1:29:51
  He basically described
• 1:29:52
  the same type of field like dynamics, but it was more yellowish okay.
• 1:29:56
  Gold colored.
• 1:29:57
  Yeah.
• 1:29:57
  And I would think that if it was plasma generated, it would depend a lot on
• 1:30:02
  what's in the atmosphere. What. Yeah.
• 1:30:04
  What it's reacting to you know what it's creating.
• 1:30:07
  To luminescent like that.
• 1:30:09
  Kind of like the aurora
• 1:30:10
  borealis changes quite a bit depending on how far it penetrates in the atmosphere
• 1:30:14
  in which gases it's actually suddenly
• 1:30:18
  charging. Exciting.
• 1:30:19
  Yeah.
• 1:30:20
  Well, anything else from that report that you might remember?
• 1:30:23
  Any other sensations or feelings even, you know, I mean, did it.
• 1:30:28
  Did you feel like it was landing for you in some sense?
• 1:30:30
  You know, I mean, well.
• 1:30:31
  I couldn't see there was nothing out there on the golf course
• 1:30:34
  that would make sense for it to be stopping over.
• 1:30:36
  Not like it was probably interested in playing around the golf.
• 1:30:40
  So I'm the only thing on the highway,
• 1:30:44
  and it was coming from the direction of Upper Heyford.
• 1:30:46
  But the guy that had the signing at
• 1:30:48
  Heyford was an hour and like 115 in the morning.
• 1:30:51
  So that's three hours, 15 minutes after my sighting.
• 1:30:54
  So his sighting was on the early hours of the 27th.
• 1:30:57
  So it was after midnight.
• 1:30:58
  Mine was on the late evening of the 26th at 10 p.m..
• 1:31:03
  So why it was coming from that direction, I don't know.
• 1:31:07
  And why it stopped by me.
• 1:31:09
  I don't know, unless there was curiosity from the craft about because,
• 1:31:14
  you know, I was a red Corvette wasn't common on the roads of England.
• 1:31:17
  It was.
• 1:31:19
  Maybe it just saw it as an unusual vehicle
• 1:31:22
  because it's, you know, it's so streamlined looking, sloped back and.
• 1:31:25
  Maybe, who knows, you're so isolated it perceived you as an opportunity of sorts.
• 1:31:30
  Maybe. For what end?
• 1:31:31
  Do you feel like you got out of your car purely for your curiosity reasons?
• 1:31:34
  Oh, absolutely.
• 1:31:36
  I mean, it was a
• 1:31:38
  my mind's immediately just trying to figure it out.
• 1:31:40
  What is this?
• 1:31:41
  It didn't it wasn't anything from the Soviet Union.
• 1:31:45
  It wasn't anything from NATO.
• 1:31:48
  It wasn't any kind of flying vehicle that I was familiar with at all.
• 1:31:51
  And it didn't.
• 1:31:53
  It wasn't like a helicopter at all either.
• 1:31:55
  Just to kind of put it into the listeners or viewers perspective.
• 1:31:58
  You know, as you're as you're
• 1:31:59
  this close to when you're looking up, like how how much space did it take up in
• 1:32:02
  your field of view, you know, to be like holding a skateboard in your hand or.
• 1:32:06
  Like, well, like that maybe from my field of view
• 1:32:09
  and I don't know exactly where it was.
• 1:32:13
  I didn't know it was beyond that first level of trees.
• 1:32:15
  And there's probably some other trees on the other side.
• 1:32:18
  I don't know the exact hole it was over
• 1:32:21
  because it was probably it was either a fairway or a hole.
• 1:32:26
  It only played that golf course once.
• 1:32:28
  Are you aware of the Air Force
• 1:32:29
  putting bunkers or weapons storage under golf courses?
• 1:32:32
  Wouldn't surprise me. No.
• 1:32:34
  Not aware of that.
• 1:32:36
  There is a golf course on the Navy.
• 1:32:38
  Likes a joke that there.
• 1:32:39
  You know, the Air Force is very proud of their golf courses.
• 1:32:41
  And they have one in every base, no matter where you go.
• 1:32:44
  So maybe they're dual purpose.
• 1:32:46
  You know, it's a convenient
• 1:32:47
  excuse to dig up a lot of land and rework it perhaps, or something there.
• 1:32:52
  Interesting theory.
• 1:32:53
  Interesting. Yeah.
• 1:32:56
  Did it illuminate the ground at all or any the surroundings?
• 1:32:58
  Do you recall?
• 1:32:59
  No. It wasn't like it was casting light.
• 1:33:02
  It wasn't like beams of light.
• 1:33:03
  Yeah, it was just these changing colors.
• 1:33:08
  They weren't like normal red, white and blue like you would see,
• 1:33:12
  you know, from, from lights.
• 1:33:14
  And it wasn't from my perspective it wasn't illuminating the trees
• 1:33:17
  or anything.
• 1:33:18
  It was rather a dark craft.
• 1:33:21
  Other than that
• 1:33:24
  all I could see
• 1:33:25
  was the outline it made because of the color
• 1:33:28
  was going around the bottom and perhaps up on the side some.
• 1:33:31
  I don't know where whatever it's doing was emanating from,
• 1:33:36
  but you couldn't hear any, like,
• 1:33:38
  gas being released to pressurized air.
• 1:33:42
  Nothing like that.
• 1:33:42
  It was just totally silent.
• 1:33:45
  And of course, my hearing was really good at that point
• 1:33:47
  because I'm just starting my fighter pilot career.
• 1:33:49
  Not so good now.
• 1:33:50
  But yeah, that was that was very distinct to me.
• 1:33:55
  And I think just just the overall curiosity,
• 1:33:58
  you know, I wasn't scared of it at first.
• 1:34:00
  I was just incredibly curious,
• 1:34:04
  until I realized that curiosity could, could lose my career if anybody knew.
• 1:34:09
  And I told anybody, so I didn't. It's,
• 1:34:13
  not your actions, but just generally shameful that we, as a species,
• 1:34:16
  as a humanity, were in a position where we had to hide such information.
• 1:34:20
  I agree of such importance, potentially.
• 1:34:22
  You know, if you read all the stuff that was a CIA directive,
• 1:34:26
  you know, and maybe the people on the inside of the program,
• 1:34:29
  in fact, they've often used,
• 1:34:33
  people thinking they saw a UFO out at area
• 1:34:36
  51 and used it to their effect to hide things
• 1:34:40
  like the F-117 doing test flying and so forth.
• 1:34:44
  And I was never stationed there.
• 1:34:46
  But I've been out there because I was on some unacknowledged SAP programs that,
• 1:34:52
  the use APS, the unacknowledged special access programs that are bigoted.
• 1:34:55
  And and you have very few people ran in.
• 1:34:58
  But then when you're out there, they put these goggles and stuff on you,
• 1:35:02
  and you can only see how to walk straight ahead.
• 1:35:04
  And they're gardening with rifles and, you know,
• 1:35:07
  you're not allowed to see anything that's not part of what you're there for.
• 1:35:10
  And clear to super, super secret place, a very interesting place. But
• 1:35:16
  yeah,
• 1:35:18
  it's weird that I had and that was during my F-16 program thing.
• 1:35:23
  We were developing the technology for the block 50,
• 1:35:27
  and some of that was being developed out there, and it was not
• 1:35:33
  common knowledge, the capabilities that airplane was going to have.
• 1:35:36
  But we also had some special weapons that were being developed later
• 1:35:39
  as the commander at Hill Air Force Base,
• 1:35:43
  my unit has C-130 that one regularly
• 1:35:46
  take supplies out there to them from other countries for various purposes.
• 1:35:52
  And I've flown to those guys.
• 1:35:54
  But we had we had a gift that was tracking one of the very advanced
• 1:36:00
  cruise missile programs that was in developed at that time,
• 1:36:02
  and that was all being done out there.
• 1:36:06
  So yeah, my I've had back and forth when they offered me a job at one point.
• 1:36:13
  And so I went and did all the light of tests and stuff and then,
• 1:36:16
  but then the four star general decided he had other things he wanted me to do.
• 1:36:21
  So they sent me to another school.
• 1:36:24
  You know, the Air Force put me through 12 different colleges and universities,
• 1:36:27
  paid for it all and all these extra degrees.
• 1:36:30
  What do you use? What do you need that for?
• 1:36:31
  But I mean, they used all that stuff.
• 1:36:33
  They put me through school full and I always love learning.
• 1:36:36
  So I didn't mind.
• 1:36:37
  Take a year off line and go to school.
• 1:36:39
  Sounds like an ideal career to me.
• 1:36:41
  Well it was, it was one that I think with your brain
• 1:36:44
  in the way you think is so, so much like mine.
• 1:36:47
  Yeah, I always enjoyed learning new stuff and I loved getting
• 1:36:51
  into the engineering details and stuff.
• 1:36:53
  But when you have that kind of a mind and you and you invent things,
• 1:36:56
  because I invented a lot of stuff that helped flying.
• 1:36:58
  I did the first ever computerized flight program for for planning, flight planning,
• 1:37:05
  and it took us
• 1:37:06
  a good four hours before that to manually do everything and calculate everything.
• 1:37:11
  And then you had your stubby pencil on your card.
• 1:37:13
  I made it so it could be done in 45 minutes on a Atari 800 computer,
• 1:37:18
  which was the first production small that ran on
• 1:37:24
  what was a basic language, and the only language I had had military
• 1:37:28
  was in grad school.
• 1:37:30
  That was not basic. It was.
• 1:37:32
  What was the Fortran 14?
• 1:37:34
  Yeah, yeah. And this was nothing like that.
• 1:37:37
  But we didn't have to do punch cards to program this little mini computer.
• 1:37:41
  And I worked like around the clock for days and nights making that happen.
• 1:37:45
  I took some time off on a Friday and a Monday and worked all weekend
• 1:37:48
  and and got it working and then asked me, could I bring it in?
• 1:37:52
  And of course, the old guys didn't want anything to do with it because,
• 1:37:55
  you know, yeah, gimmick thing.
• 1:37:57
  Especially back then.
• 1:37:58
  But somebody used to integrating with new tech really.
• 1:38:00
  Some of the young whiz I was then had just come out of a,
• 1:38:03
  you know, their training and, and their new to the jet.
• 1:38:06
  They were curious about it because they,
• 1:38:08
  they knew something about computers at that point.
• 1:38:10
  And I remember the first guy that that did his flight planning,
• 1:38:13
  and he goes, 45 minutes and I've got my card.
• 1:38:16
  It's all for him.
• 1:38:18
  But the hardest thing was coming up with how to digitize
• 1:38:22
  all of those tables in the back for various bomb loads and drag indices.
• 1:38:28
  And because those were like all of these weird interpolation, bring these
• 1:38:33
  two points together and interpolate the lines and come up with a number.
• 1:38:36
  So it was kind of intensive to go through that, but to take all that
• 1:38:40
  and turn it into digital code, I had to go buy a
• 1:38:44
  dedicated book on polynomials and finally figured out the right
• 1:38:48
  polynomials to do the math to make it come out.
• 1:38:51
  And then I would test flight, and before I ever let anybody know about it
• 1:38:55
  and compare it to the manual calculations and stuff, and it was dead on accurate.
• 1:38:59
  I had put in a great circle navigation.
• 1:39:01
  So all the navigation stuff,
• 1:39:03
  even the turn radius, everything just matched perfectly.
• 1:39:07
  So when I was finally happy with it, you know, put my my squadron
• 1:39:11
  commander, let me put it in a squadron and they started using it.
• 1:39:14
  And then I couldn't get my computer back.
• 1:39:15
  So eventually the other squadrons one on one too.
• 1:39:18
  So I talked to him and went up to the wing commander and said,
• 1:39:20
  if you'll give me permission with the contracting folks to,
• 1:39:24
  I'll tell them what computers to buy, and I'll put the code in them.
• 1:39:26
  And every squadron can have one of these,
• 1:39:27
  and maybe I can take my computer back home with me.
• 1:39:30
  So they did all that and all the squadrons had that.
• 1:39:32
  And later I did a information system because we used to get the frag,
• 1:39:37
  I don't know what the court in the Navy, but it was a fragmentary order of battle.
• 1:39:41
  So headquarters, Usafe, you would send out this thing by teletype,
• 1:39:46
  and the only teletype machine was in the command post,
• 1:39:49
  and then they would rip off sections of it and hand it to a sergeant,
• 1:39:52
  and he'd get in a pickup truck and drive around the perimeter road
• 1:39:56
  to deliver each squadron its things.
• 1:39:58
  And I thought, how well is this going to work if we're under attack?
• 1:40:02
  Yeah.
• 1:40:03
  So I got to thinking, how do we how do we digitize this?
• 1:40:06
  And we had these secure phone lines, but they didn't
• 1:40:10
  run on a network that went off the base that were underground on the base,
• 1:40:13
  very secure.
• 1:40:14
  We could talk any classified over them, and they only connected
• 1:40:17
  between the command post and each of the squadrons
• 1:40:20
  when they were working in our bunkered area.
• 1:40:24
  So I decided
• 1:40:25
  they had just come out with this new thing called a modulator demodulator,
• 1:40:29
  a modem where you could do a acoustic coupler with a phone.
• 1:40:33
  So I went to the wing Commander and said, you know, mine,
• 1:40:36
  I'd like to get your contracting folks to allow me
• 1:40:39
  to buy some things off the economy, because it leaned a couple
• 1:40:42
  to the British style headset or, you know, handset for the phone.
• 1:40:47
  And he let me work on that.
• 1:40:49
  And I actually did this computerized information system.
• 1:40:54
  It allowed us to take the frag and send it, digitize it,
• 1:40:58
  and then analog analog it to go on the phone lines
• 1:41:02
  and then undo it on the other end are taking that analog
• 1:41:07
  and make it digital and have a printer that would print it all out real fast.
• 1:41:12
  So it came electronically, and yet you could still
• 1:41:15
  have your fragmentary order of battle right there in the unit.
• 1:41:18
  Sounds like fax machine.
• 1:41:20
  Yeah, kind of like that.
• 1:41:21
  Well, it's incredible,
• 1:41:22
  you know, hearing you talk about kind of the state of technology at this time,
• 1:41:27
  while you're also observing what appeared to be extremely advanced craft.
• 1:41:31
  Not familiar with.
• 1:41:33
  I interrupted you before when you were about to zip ahead
• 1:41:35
  ten years to talk about your your second experience.
• 1:41:38
  Maybe we can jump into that now.