“That's No Balloon!”: F-18 Pilot Reconsiders His UAP Encounter | Austin Hulbert

Safe Aerospace Podcast · Sep 11, 2026 · 59m · transcript

Three passes. A persistent radar contact. A brief glimpse of something silvery off the wing.

Former Navy F-18 pilot Austin Hulbert and his weapons systems officer called it a balloon and moved on. Years later, Austin started building stratospheric balloons for the military. That explanation no longer made sense to him.

I sit down with Austin, one of my instructors during Navy flight training, to revisit his encounter off the coast of Virginia Beach and what changed his mind. We discuss what he remembers seeing, what the radar was tracking, and why neither crew member thought much of it at the…