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

A red Corvette alone on a dark English road. Strange lights closing fast in the rearview mirror, then stopping dead. A silent, color-shifting craft hovering just above a golf course.

Dan Isbell spent his career at the leading edge of American airpower. He went straight into the left seat of the F-111, the first variable-sweep-wing fighter, flew nuclear alert for NATO at the height of the Cold War, graduated first in his Air Force Test Pilot School class, and eventually flew more than 70 different types of aircraft. He later helped shape the F-22 program and pioneered the fiber-laser work behind today's directed-energy weapons. On the night of December 26, 1980, driving home from alert duty at RAF Upper Heyford, he saw something he could not explain, and told no one for more than 40 years.

In part one of a two-part conversation, I sit down with Dan to trace that career from a poor kid who had never set foot on an airport to a test pilot who talked his way into Georgia Tech and never looked back. We discuss the F-111 and the jets that followed, the near-fatal moments he survived, the lung injury he still carries from an F-16 ground fire, and then the encounter itself: a roughly 50-to-60-foot triangular craft ringed with shifting, plasma-like color, completely silent, that descended toward him as he walked closer before he thought better of it and drove away.

Dan does not claim to know what he saw. He says he worked through every prosaic explanation he could, from a helicopter to a Soviet or NATO aircraft to a reverse-engineered platform of our own, and none of them fit. His sighting also falls within hours of the late-December nights now known as the Rendlesham Forest incident. He kept all of it to himself for decades, convinced that reporting it could end his flying career. Whether the object was an unacknowledged craft, an atmospheric phenomenon, or something genuinely outside our physics, his account raises the question this show keeps returning to: how many credible aviators have stayed silent, and what do we lose as a nation when the people best equipped to observe our skies are the ones with the most to lose by speaking?

Learn more, become a member, and support our work at: https://www.safeaerospace.org

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode to help us continue producing independent aviation-safety research and conversations.

What is Safe Aerospace Podcast?

What are pilots really seeing in our skies, and why aren't we talking about it?

The Safe Aerospace Podcast brings together military aviators, commercial pilots, air traffic controllers, aerospace professionals, and policymakers to tackle one of aviation's most pressing and least discussed challenges: UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) in controlled airspace.

Hosted by Former F/A-18 pilot, Ryan Graves from Americans for Safe Aerospace, the podcast goes beyond the headlines to explore what UAP encounters mean for flight safety, national security, and the future of airspace transparency. Each episode features firsthand accounts from credentialed professionals, analysis of emerging policy developments, and conversations with the researchers and lawmakers working to bring scientific rigor and institutional accountability to a long-stigmatized issue.

As I had started walking toward it
and began to descend.

Looking at it.

And then something possessed me
to start walking toward it,

and it appeared to be about 50
to 60ft long.

It was sort of a triangular shape,
sort of around the bottom and side of this

craft was all of this changing lights,
different colors of light.

Did illuminate the ground at all
or any the surroundings.

Do you recall?

No, it wasn't like it was casting light.

It wasn't like beams of light.

It took about six months to be fully
certified as a NATO combat pilot.

But then once you're certified,
you're also then sitting full alert.

But because I was the young guy,
the youngest guy in the squadron,

the newbie,
I got the privilege of sitting on alerts

that took up holidays
like Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And so on December 26th, that Friday,
I was coming back from the base course.

I'm driving myself home with my Corvette,
so I as I'm driving,

I noticed in my rearview mirror
some really strange looking lights

that are coming in very fast
from behind me

and they come beam me
and it just stops instantly.

But as I'm having that thought and
then all of a sudden I go, wait a minute.

I certainly held my first encounter
to myself for nearly 45 years.

Could have threatened
my entire flying career.

Especially the stigma was so bad
back then.

So I didn't tell a soul.

It's kind of thing, though,
that you you don't forget.

Welcome
back to the Safe Aerospace Podcast.

My name is Ryan Graves.

This will be part
one of two parts with former

Air Force fighter pilot turned test
pilot Dan Isbell.

He's had a number of incidents in his life
and were excited to bring those to.

You really blew my hair back.

If you like this content, please
be sure to like and subscribe!

It's been incredible how fast we've grown.

We're really building a strong community
here.

Also, be sure to go to Safe Aerospace
if you want to learn

more about our work
and about the reports that we've received.

And now my conversation with Dan Isbell.

Welcome back to the Safe
Aerospace Podcast.

My name is Ryan Graves.

Very excited
to sit down here with Dan Isbell.

I'll let him introduce his call sign.

But we come from somewhat
similar backgrounds. And,

then you came forward
to Americans for Safe Aerospace

in May of 2023 to report
several incidences that you've had.

But first,
you have an absolutely incredible.

Aviation background.

So love,
just a quick introduction to yourself and,

you know, hear a little bit about that
before we get into the UUP stuff.

So thanks for joining us. Okay. Well,
thanks for inviting me.

It's a real pleasure to be here.

Great to finally meet you in person. Yeah.

I really enjoyed our first interview
for video cast, but, this is very special.

So thanks for bringing me out.

So I, I grew up kind of poor, and

so I didn't have any experience
with airplanes.

None.

Never even set foot on an airport.

So I never flown.

Didn't know anything about them.

And I saw a TV commercial
in black and white in about 1969,

which the Air Force had put on

just before the station's
go to just total test pattern.

And there's no programing after that.

And it blew me away.

It was F-104 Starfighter taking off.

I, I now know out of Edwards on a test
flight, had a photo chase airplane

which was also a safety chase,
and they were going up

and doing maneuvers
with the F-104 in its development.

And they had this incredible
accessible music,

and they had a great narrator
with a deep voice.

And he was narrating the John Gillespie
Magee Jr poem called High Flight.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds
and danced on laughter, silvered wings.

And they had the airplane choreographing.

They picked,

I guess, parts of the footage
from the photo chase

and choreographed it, doing these roles

and tumbling around in the clouds and
and of course, as it gets

to the end, talks
about as I tread our as I

as I was up in the on trespass
sanctity of space,

put out my hand
and touched the face of God.

And at that point, the F-104 had gone
into one of these zoom climbs

and just sort of disappears in the black,
and it gave me such goosebumps.

And I go,
that's what I want to do with my life.

And I was just sure of it then,
but I had really no pathway,

so I did the best I could in school.

I skipped a year between 10th and 12th
grade so I could get on with it quicker.

Found out about ROTC.

I didn't know about the Academy, but I applied to Air Force ROTC for a scholarship

pilot

scholarship, and I went through all this
testing without any prior knowledge.

I guess I guessed my way through it
pretty well, and I did win,

a scholarship for full ride.

For years

they paid for everything, and I could
choose any school in the country to go to.

So I chose Georgia Tech
because of aerospace engineering,

and they were ranked
number one back in 73.

And that that discipline.

Still a very good school.

Yeah. Great school.

And then they turned me down

and I so I made an appointment
to see the dean of admissions,

which turned me down and said, well,

our minimum requirement
is two years of high school calculus

and you have no calculus.

And I said, well,
even if I'd stayed all 12 years,

they didn't teach calculus
at my high school.

Said, don't you have a tutoring program
for your athletes and stuff?

And he said, yeah. I said,
I'll be there every night.

I'll guarantee
you, I'll make an A in calculus one.

And if I make an A in calculus one,
when I be on at least an equal playing

field with everybody else
going into cocktails

two maybe a little ahead of the people
that didn't make an A in the first.

And he said, well, yeah,
if you could do that.

And I said, well, I don't think
you understand how determined I am.

So I told him my circumstances
and I had this one shot

and that the reason I chose Georgia Tech
is because you got the best aerospace

engineering school,

and I want to be an aerospace
engineer, to be a test pilot someday.

And he
said, well, that's our toughest school.

I said, great, bring it on.

That's that's why it's important to me.

I said, right now, there's only one thing
standing between me and my ultimate goal,

and it's you.

I looked dead in the eye.

I said, won't you please give me a chance?

You won't be disappointed.

And he did.

And I did what I said I would do.

And I made an A in first quarter
calculus and science, all the courses.

And then that set me on a good path.

But that was an important decision.

And it hadn't.

If it hadn't been for that, I would not
have made it to where I eventually did.

So I went to pilot training,
but there was about a

indefinite delay right after graduation.

So I got commissioned.

But. And then I'm just not activated yet.

So I'm thinking, what am I going to do?

And I'm graduate advisor from Georgia
Tech's aerospace engineering school came

and he said, listen, we would like
to have you working on your masters

and we'll give you a full ride
assistantship,

but you're going to work on a project
for NASA to determine

how turbine blades
are failing in the F-15s.

And it's a mode three stress failure,
meaning it's got both

tension torsion and a thermal gradient.

So we need you to create an apparatus
to recreate

those conditions in the lab.

And we want you to test those turbine
blades to failure over and over and again.

And we're going to send that off
to Metallurg

just so they can figure this out.

I said, okay, deal.

But I said the day I get orders
to pilot training,

I'm leaving him and if I haven't finished

and he said, okay, we'll accept that.

And so about three quarters of the way
through with my master's in aerospace

engineering, I got orders to Williams
Air Force Base in Arizona, pilot training,

and I went to my graduate advisor
and said, remember what I said?

I don't want them to know.

I've been here in school
because I, you know,

there's guys that that took
an editor delay to finish a degree

and then they end up losing their pod slot
and going to Apha to teach.

And I didn't want to be one of those.

Nothing more important
when you got, you know,

you're on that path and losing your slot.

I can I can relate to that.

Yeah.

Did you ever consider the Navy as a path?

I did, I applied to both,
but I told myself,

whichever one comes in the mail
and accepts me first.

Yeah, I'll take it.

And the Air Force came first, and.

And I accepted it already.

And of course, they were
the ones that had the F-104, so.

Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, my dad was in the Navy in World
War two for the entirety of the war.

Yeah.

So it was important to him.

He wanted me to be in the Navy.

And I said, well, you know, I'm
going to apply for both of them.

In fact, I applied for the Army
and the Marine Corps.

Anything that would get me in the air,
even if it was a helicopter.

But my goal was to be

an Air Force fighter

pilot and test pilots,
since they had given me the scholarship.

So when often did pilot training
and after that,

at the end of the year, we didn't
get choices about what we wanted to fly

and just knew I wanted to fly fighters,
but we didn't get to like say,

oh, I want to be an F-16
fighter, F-15 pilot, or F-4, whatever.

It just came down in a block.

And all of our fighter assignments,
except for one,

were F-111 to the left seat
to be aircraft commander.

They had never done that before.

Such a complex airplane
they normally had required.

You have at least one other fighter
with at least 1000 hours,

and then you go to the right seat
and you be a pilot

weapon systems officer until they decide
you can upgrade to the left seat.

So this was a
shock, and I guess it was a trial balloon

to see if students out of pilot training
could actually handle the airplane.

And some of us made it through
and some didn't. But,

for me as an aerospace engineer,
I kind of relished the opportunity

because here's a plane,
the first ever variable swing wing.

And the F-111.

B was the Navy's version that was supposed
to be, you know, part of this.

And it had the B model had the same radar
that eventually was in the Tomcat

in the A model
and took the Phoenix missiles.

So it was quite, quite amazing that
they put all that in there in the B model.

But you know, it was a little heavy

and really hard on the tailhook
landing on the system.

So the Navy decided against it.

But out of that came the second variable
swinging the famous Tomcat.

I never got to fly the tomcat.
I wish I did.

I've flown a number of Navy airplanes,
including the F-18, but never the Tomcat.

Anyway, I really

enjoyed my time in the F-111.

My first assignment

after I went through the replacement
training unit in Mountain Home, Idaho,

I went to the United Kingdom,

was stationed at RAF Upper Heyford,
and I was there for four and a half years.

I was like your
your operational first operational tour?

Yes. Yeah.

And because we had a tactical
nuclear role,

it took a while
to get all the clearances to,

to upgrade to a t s CI clearance.

And of course we're under a personal
liability program.

So, you know, you got to see the site
if anything's in question.

Is that a different personal reliability
program than what an average

pilot would be on because you were working
with nuclear capable systems?

Exactly. Yeah. Everything to man control.

And we did alert
sitting with live weapons.

That was all not released
to the public at that time.

But of course, the

mod knew that we were
we were defending NATO with

those should the,
should the Cold War break into a hot war.

So we set alert very frequently.

And because I was the youngest guy
and the new me in the 79th Attack Fighter

Squadron, which was a great squadron,
was all the way back to World War one.

It's currently a are assigned to the block

50 F-16s in South Carolina.

And they're the the modern

go after the

missile systems.

So they put themselves

in danger to get lit up
and then take them out with harm missiles.

So that roll had been done
by a four GS before that, and then the F,

the F-16 block 50 took that program

anyway.

Because of that, I said on holidays

during, the other people that had more
seniority could be with their families.

And one of those holidays
that year was Christmas.

So I was on the the week
we would go like Friday to Friday

and I that Thursday was December 25th.

And then the day after Christmas was

when I changed over to the next crew.

And and we can get into that in a bit.

But that's where I had my first encounter
on the way home from that assignment.

Then I'd also,

as I finished, was finishing up
my tour there.

I'd been selected for an F-16
following assignment,

consecutive overseas
tour to talk on air base in Madrid, Spain.

And I was all excited about that.

And I flew down there on a European Eagle,
which was a C-130.

You can just fly around the NATO and

and the only other guy
that actually got to go to pilot training

and out of my graduating class of ROTC
guys, there was only two of us

that ended up getting to go,
and his name was Phil Breedlove.

And Phil Breedlove
went all the way to four star general

and was the Supreme Allied Commander
of Europe in his final tour.

So he and I got to go to.

Yeah.

And we we went same pilot training class
and so we went through that together.

Great guy.

Just a really great guy
and still very involved.

Four star general.

Never seemed to get to retire. Yeah.

But anyway,

that was a very special experience for me
because he was already stationed there.

He had just moved to there
and he was going to be my sponsor.

So he already got my patches and my scarf
and oh, it was exciting.

The whole squadrons were,
you know, really welcoming me.

And we did a Friday night
beer called The Other and he took me.

He said, I found a few houses
that you might want to rent,

and one of them had a swimming pool
in the front

yard and a grape over arbor
over in the driveway.

It was a beautiful place in the foothills
there, and I just gorgeous.

I said, man, this is it.

So I put a down payment on that
to rent it, $100 deposit.

And I was all excited.

And as I flew back on the European Eagle
back to RAF Upper Heyford in England,

I started thinking, you know,
I just applied for the test pilot school

to get my name in the hat, but no one,
I didn't have enough hours or

I only had this one airplane experience.

And normally they require

two airplane experience and a lot,
a lot older person than me.

But I'm just trying
to get my foot in the door.

So get back home and I get a call.

And so the command post is patching me

through to a call file of Randolph
Air Force Base here in Texas.

And the guy didn't introduce himself
for what's going on.

And he says,

I understand you have an assignment,
the F-16, to talk on air base

and that you're going to Luke
for training on such and such date.

I said, yep, that's that's correct.

And he said,
have you shipped household goods yet?

And I said, no, the Packers come Monday.

So this is on the Friday before.

And he said,
have you made any financial commitments

that you're unwilling
to absorb out of pocket?

I said, well, I'll put $100
deposit on a house down in Spain. And

I shipped my Corvette to the States and
sitting in a New York harbor right now.

But no, I guess not.

What are you asking?

He said, well, this is the test
pilot school board, and we wanted to know,

do you want to go to your F-16 assignment,

which was my absolute coveted

favorite bird that I wanted to fly.

Aren't
you want to go to test pilot school?

And I got this mental image
that he maybe had a red marker and ready

to make a big X across my package
if I turned it down.

And I thought,

well, this is my whole dream,
but I didn't want to let go of the F-16.

But then I thought, no, wait a minute.

I graduated test pilot school

and I'm becoming F-16 test pilot,
which would be even more fun.

So I accepted that change.

And so instead of taking my wife
to beautiful house with a swimming pool

and just a lovely setting all around
Madrid.

Yeah, we're taking her out to the desert
and the Mojave Desert

at Edwards Air Force Base,
but she was a good sport about it.

And and off we went.

And that was in the summer of 1984.

So I went

through the test pilot school
and graduated very well.

Didn't expect to be number one,
but that's how it ended up.

But, you know, it was my dream.

So I was really working hard at it.

And then I had, right before I graduated,

one of the things that test pilot students
and then later test pilots

get to do
is called qualitative evaluation flying.

Okay.

When you go out with an airplane you're
not trained in, you have no instructor.

You just get in and you fly.

It kind of feel it out. Yeah.

And you use all your
and this is later in the course.

So you use everything you've been taught
to look at the airplane, study its design,

think about their flow,
think about all the things

that that would be
handling quality maybe issues.

You read the flight manual.

You memorize the

the emergency, you know, code red stuff
so that if you've got to have the bold

face, you have that memorized
and then you climb in.

So we got guys that had experience nothing
but like B-52s with 5 or 6 man crew

that are stepping into a sevens
when there's never was a second cockpit

and going out and flying them

with just a guy in a chase airplane,
you can't do the controls for you.

And so

it was quite
an experience for them. For me.

I relished every minute of all of that.

And I and they would try to get around
35 different aircraft during the school.

Oh, really?

And so we did a lot of exchanging
with the Navy's test pilot school,

Patuxent River, Maryland.

And I'm sure you're familiar with them.

They they did
the only rotary wing test course.

Okay. I wasn't aware of that. Yeah. Yeah.

So one of the things that.

Would be difficult doing being fixed wing
and then going to do a

flight on a helicopter.

So but that was what I thought
if I want to try that.

So I put my name in the hat
to, to go fly helicopters there.

And, and I'd
already had a chance in qualify airplanes.

They brought to Edwards to fly the S three
which was, you know,

one of the ship based aircraft carrier
based submarine Hunter aircraft.

I know we both know David Favor.

Well, you know who he is at least.

But that was actually his first aircraft.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

That's an interesting airplane.

I didn't fly it off the carrier
just flew it off Edwards.

And then I got a chance to fly the P-3,
which was the land

based with a big magnetic
anomaly detector boom in the back.

And again,
when I say fly them, we're talking about

if it's a two place airplane in the front,
you fly in the captain's chair, you know

the left, see if it's a helicopter,
you fly in the right seat. So

really a

privilege because the people that came
knew that, okay, this guy's,

you know, in test pilot training
and he's obviously pretty good.

And they wouldn't
be letting him come try this.

But I enjoyed.

At the same time, you know, you are,

you know, inducing a lot of risk
being in that platform for the first time.

So actually
probably a pretty interesting dynamic.

Yeah. Yeah.

And again like airplanes like the A seven
and the A-10 I've flown both of those.

There are no two seat variants of them.

And so you just you just do

your best of understanding the airplane
before you get to it.

Do a good walk around
thinking about everything that

that might be different about it,
and then go up there and give it a go.

And so I continued doing that
throughout my career.

And a before I retired, I had,

flown 70 different types of models.

And one of those was the the early F-18,
not the Super Hornet, but the marine.

It was a marine Corps brought it in.

They had a two seater
and the marine pilot sat in the back.

I sat in the front

and I got to park that thing at 70 degrees
angle of attack stably.

Now it was going down.

It didn't have the thrust to keep that,

but I had never seen 70 degrees
angle of attack in any airplane.

You could feel
the vibrations of vertical tail.

This was before

they put the splitter plates
on the top of the legs to kind of move.

That vortex was amazing.

Look back and, you know,

barely see the frequency of those tails
vibrating, but you could feel it.

And the aircraft had amazing

avionics
for foreign aircraft of that type.

And cockpit was bigger than the F-16,
quite as big as an F-15.

But the F-15 seemed like a coward.

And I flown the A's, the seas, the

even the prototype of the E!

It was such an exciting time
to to really experience flight

from a guy that had never even touched
an airplane before all of this.

Well, let me let me real quick.

You know, I mean, the Super Hornet
was very maneuverable as well.

You know, people think of fighters.
How fast can it go?

How many G's gonna pull?

And I'm sure you're probably
where being as fast as possible

or pulling the most used necessarily
isn't the best.

Best thing you want to.

That's not the goal in dogfight, right?

Being fastest and always a bass.

No, but the FAA team was unique
because it could bleed airspeed so fast.

Yeah, it's extremely maneuverable.

I mean, one of the
I enjoyed doing it more, almost anything.

It just just like you said, going vertical
on the cans as slow as I can.

Basically I get down to 80 knots and
just hang out there and then, you know,

most people don't realize this, but,
you know,

when you're in a fight, you're basically
Max performing the jet one way or another.

And, you know, gravity always wins.

You're always basically depleting
your energy until you get to the deck.

And then the fight transitions from,

what we call two circle.

We were trying to ride around on the
Persian, the one circle where who can go

the slowest and get behind
F18 was was phenomenal at doing that.

And then you combine that with a high off
board sight missile

and there wasn't too many people
we couldn't take out.

Yeah. It's fascinating. Airplane.

I was, I was working in the Pentagon
in program analysis

and evaluation, and they had never hired
a test pilot for that job before.

But they they recruited me right out of

the National Defense University.

I was going through the Air
Command and Staff College.

They recruited me
because I was a test pilot,

even though I didn't have an operation

as research systems analyst degree,
which is what's normally in that seat.

And they brought me into an office and.

Man, I got to sit in Boyd's

seat, his desk, and he was there.

Yeah.

Not just the position,
but his physical desk, his.

Physical desk, his office, his desk
that that became my office.

And we didn't have a Navy rep
when I first got there.

So I, you know, they they made me wear
civilian coat and die every day.

I hadn't wear my uniform at all
ever in the Pentagon because I'm said,

you're not working for the Air Force

now you're working
for the secretary of defense.

So I quickly had to go out
and buy a wardrobe

because I didn't really have
those kind of clothes. Yeah.

And then,

my boss, who was a brilliant

man, he was one of those MIT
whiz kids hired under McNamara.

And it was McNamara
that created the F-111 program.

And he had done some work in the ship
field for a while.

And then he he became the head of the
all of the aviation

stuff, attack air, tactical aviation.

So we had the F-18 Super Hornet
in development test at that point.

And they had a wing drop phenomenon

that was happening early
in the test program, which they solved.

But in all of a sudden.

Sonic regime or is this.

Yeah,
I remember learning about that. Yeah.

And, you know,
of course OSD is really worried.

I wonder, you know, are they going
to be able to save the program?

And they did.

But I got to go down and talk to the Navy

guys and, you know, get details
and bring that back to my boss.

And every night
he would pick my brain on stuff.

He said, the main reason we brought you up
here is because the F-22,

we do not understand what we're getting
into with this airplane.

And so

he had
me explaining things about the F-22.

And so I was really hawking that
for the OSD in the Air Force.

And I ended up doing a very

technical thing

for the Secretary of Acquisition,

because the Air Force kind of refused
to do the kind of study they wanted, but

they wanted a, the one on one and,
you know, higher level

and then a full more engagement,
putting the f 22

in comparison to the two s slept,
you know, a service life extension

F-15 with a little bit of treatment
for reducing

some of the signature and the

what was the Joint Strike
Fighter at the time, which later became,

you know, the F 35.

And so we also had to include in the war
game, you know, things like the B-2. So

I had so many

USF clearances to be able to do that

and went out to some of our FFR DCS

and also got permission to get Lockheed
skunkworks involved.

And I said, you know, their their testing
won't be the final answer, but

it'll be in comparison because they've got
probably the best models.

And they allowed me to do that.

And anyway,
the final analysis was pretty convincing

that now the F-22 is definitely worth
keeping because of all the things

it's going to be able to do that
none of the are the airplanes could do.

So it kind of saved
the program at the time.

And but I got a lot of appreciation
from some very high up people in the,

in the Defense Department for finally
giving them a real no kidding, big deal

decision.

Yeah, technically, what year was this.

That would have been in,

let's see, I was in the Pentagon
from 98 through 2001.

So probably around the year

2000 or maybe 99.

That's when they
they wanted that study done.

And I delivered.

You know, the F-22 versus the JSF, right?

Different platforms
in a lot of different ways.

You know, the correct me
if I'm wrong, but, you know, at least

as a Navy guy looking at that platform,
it was designed to be

a superior fighter in a lot of ways,
obviously more stealthy.

I was wondering,
you know, if you can if you can share

what were the
the characteristics that you had

that made it
an acceptable next generation fighter?

Because there's been a lot of controversy,
like,

do we really want to have
an extremely fast, extremely maneuverable,

really great fighter,
or do we want to have, you know,

in contrast,
a Joint Strike Fighter type aircraft 35,

which is almost a situational awareness
drinker, right?

Just takes in all the information,

can act as a as a battle commander,
mission commander for multiple platforms.

It's not as maneuverable.

It's perhaps more stealthy.

I don't know what

what what was your assessment of the 22,
why it would be so valuable?

Well, I had been in Edwards as a test
pilot school instructor during

the time that the fly off happened
between the Y of 23 and the YF 22.

So these are the test models.

Those were the what ultimately came
the F-22 and the F-35.

Correct.

No, no.

For the wife, 23 was a competitor. The

really gangly

looking airplane with very canted out

that were both horizontal
and vertical tails,

was actually a faster airplane

than the F-22
and actually a little stealthy.

But Lockheed
did some things in their program secretly

not unannounced, but, they

they decided that during the test program.

No, it wasn't a requirement
that they would actually fire a name nine

X out of the side bay and firing
em ram out of the main bay and show

the the aircraft's capabilities like that.

And of course, the F-22 was the only one
that had thrust vectoring nozzles.

And they're not 3D.

They're 2D because they're very stealthy
from the rear as well.

And they could count 22 degrees
plus and minus.

And that gave tremendous maneuverability.

And of course, I know
you've seen one at an air show before.

And what one.

Yeah.

Did you, I thought one at risk

of taking a slightly off track,
but firing a name.

Nine X is one thing,
but allowing allowing the ability

to utilize a seeker, which creates
a lot of value is a whole nother thing.

And having it internal to the body
limits that capability quite a bit.

It definitely does.

And so what I would fight them
and, you know,

we were fighting rag students, the,
the guys going through the rag.

So they weren't that great.

But I mean, we would take

six or 7 or 8 shots on them,
you know, during the whole fight.

And then we get down to that
one circle fight at the end and all right,

then you just see them
kind of do one of these and come down and,

you know, get that last shot and, and call
the knock

it off and fights over and it's like,
okay, you want congratulations.

But well,
I don't want to get into too much detail,

but I'll just say the secret limitations
were a real concern for them.

Yeah. In their ability.

And they have been

in fact in the the upgrade program,
the very expensive upgrade program.

Are they going to do a lot to
to bring it up to standards?

They're finally going to have a helmet
mounted display

that can actually work
within that very refined cockpit.

It has a lot of very special metals in it

to streamline and not have anything
coming into the cockpit.

No reflections there
even though it's just pure polycarbonate.

So there there were limitations
on the technologies available

to do a helmet

mounted display in that aircraft,
even though we got it

into all the fourth generation fighters.

And of course, it was integrated
for complete

everywhere with the Dash system
and the Up 35.

And I developed a lot of the capabilities
on that binocular system

for the Up 35 using F-16 simulators,
the dome simulators at Fort Worth.

It was quite interesting
what you could do with that.

They looked at doing it into the F-16,
but we didn't have enough core

processing power.

In fact, the the JSF didn't
the way it was originally planned.

But time caught up and Moore's
Law caught up.

And next thing you know,
you could actually do it.

So that very expensive helmet
has capabilities we've never seen before.

And like you say, it just sucks up
all the information all around it.

And the dash system
is truly amazing in there.

They're even upgrading the 35

with a something
that's like four times as high resolution.

I forget what Dash stands for,
but do you do you recall?

But it's basically a distributed it's.

A distributed aperture. System system.

That's what it is.

So basically around the craft itself,

sensors, infrared sensors, I understand
perhaps it's something else as well

allow you to take missile
launches, you know, behind you.

Yeah.

All sorts of stuff.

And that gets pumped into to the helmet.
Yeah.

And it's a
it's like a basketball around you.

You can see up down back for
you can look down between your legs

and you don't see the airplane,
you see what's directly below you.

And so you know, you can pick up people
in the heat signature of people,

the equipment tanks, armor,
whatever out there.

And the beauty of it is you just anywhere
you look,

you can designate that
that's my target and go for it.

And that's. Super helpful.

I mean. That's.

Yeah, even F-18, we had the system

helmet mounted cueing system and nowhere
near the amount of capabilities.

But even just being able
to look and designate

a point on the ground, never mind
a moving target was super valuable.

Yeah.

Well, the F-22, even though
it has dogfighting capabilities,

which are generally pretty good,
it was really optimized for BR.

And the radar that was put in
it was the most powerful,

a active electronically scanned array
and that had ever been invented.

It had all kinds of

frequency hopping

in it to try to not let it be seen.

But they never did put even a basic
forward looking infrared system in it.

So that's been a deficit
that they're going to try to make up for.

But the time that they made
the requirement for that in the 80s,

it was all about defeating the Soviet
Union's latest,

you know, eschew 27
and follow ons to that.

And so it was
it was optimized for a Cold War scenario,

which is one of the reasons
it didn't have a lot of range

compared to what they're looking for
now for a Pacific theater.

And not only not only range, but,
you know,

it's moving away from active systems
as well.

Anything that you're emitting from a craft
is now a homing

signal, more or less for enemy capability.

And even that fatigue is getting,

oh gosh, what are they called?

But they're getting,

oh. Slipping my mind the forward looking.

It's not a flier pod, obviously,

but it's a, it's a targeting system
and infrared targeting system.

A passive targeting system.

I guess some buddies
been flying around with it.

I mean, the Russians have had those,

I think, since the 80s or 90s,
but we just never invested into them.

Well, they're putting two IR sensor pods
that are also very stealthy out

on the outboard
sections of the F-22 in this upgrade,

and that's going to give them
stereoscopic IR.

Plus, when you take your wingman
and other sources

and you blend all that together
without sending a single radar trace out

there, you're going to get 3D orientation
of where the target is.

And of course, that can all be fed
into your aim nine X,

but it's optimized to go really high

and not as fast as like our predecessor
aircraft like the F-111 was a mock

2.5 and the F model
that has the much more powerful engines,

and it could probably go Mach three,
but it take all the pain off the airplane.

It's been done a few times, but the F-14,

you know, is also a good fast airplane.

So 2.25,
which is the stated max for the Raptor

to try to not burn off
all the stealth coatings.

It's still pretty fast.

And if you can get up to mock two
and you can be up around 55,000ft,

you put so much kinetic
and potential energy

on the missile
before it even leaves the rail,

that you super extend the range
and reason.

Having to have much bigger
missile, expensive missile.

Although of course we're working on that.
Yeah, we're working on those.

And they're designed to be able to fit in
both the F-35 and the F-22 weapons base.

But, you know, the the fighter pilots
kind of learned the lesson from the F-4

when they didn't put a gun in it

because they thought
missile is going to do the job.

And they didn't forget that lesson.

And so they put an internal Gatling gun
into the F-22.

And to me at the time,
because the technology had improved

so much,
I thought, man, that's a lot of weight.

And why are we doing that still?

Because you're
you got $22 billion of investments

to have this kind of stealth,
most stealthy thing ever built,

and you're going to throw all that away

that you have

no business getting into a within range,
you know, dogfight.

But I think they're thinking was
we want the hedge on the bet regardless.

Yeah.

But that's certainly not
where it's designed to operate.

And when it operates in BVR mode,
nobody ever sees it.

It's just visual range for those. Yeah.

Thank you.

And then the W VR within visual range
where you do your dogfighting.

It's not optimized for that though.

The thrust vectoring helps
it do some really Frankie turns.

Yeah yeah.

But yeah like you said,
when the Hornet Super Hornet, you could

you could do some pretty amazing stuff

because of the controllability
of those canton twin tails.

So yeah, I'm, I was very impressed
by the early models of it.

I never got to fly the Super Hornet.

Did you ever get the earlier one

before you went to the Super Hornet
or the Super Hornet?

I'm trying to think,

no, I went right to the Super Hornet.

In the rag

in the Fleet Replacement Squadron,
where you train on your fleet aircraft.

They have the Charlie models,
you know, Alpha through.

Yeah.

Delta Air, and then the E and FS,
and I was trying to remember.

Did I fly in any of the, the, the

the regular Old Hornets,
but no, just, just the Super Hornet.

Well certainly there

they have the same F-18 designation,
but they are very different things.

As you know, it's much bigger.

And in fact, the if 17,
which was a competitor to the Y of 16

back in the lightweight fight or fly off
is super small, but it has that shape.

You know, it was a lightweight fighter.

So it was it was being designed to compete
for that Air Force requirement.

But the derivative of that scaled up
to be the original F-18 Hornet, a model.

And then of course, that got scaled up
much, much greater

to make the Super Hornet.

You know, the the Lex is much larger.

You have bigger weighing more fuel.

I think it's about 33% larger.

Yeah, it's it's impressively bigger.

But my gosh, what a good airplane
that's been for the Navy.

It's such a great
not just a dogfight or a ship defense,

but it's a great multi-role airplane
and can carry a lot of tonnage out there

to, to the space.

So yeah, it's,

it's it was really a pleasure
having the career I did.

It was like a dream come true.

I feel very lucky.

Blessed even, because I know,

I, you know, I,
I have a strong belief in God, and,

I know God saved my life a few times
when I shouldn't come back.

One times he changed the laws of physics,
I believe,

to keep me from hitting the ground.

When I was an instructor

pilot with that student
that was having trouble in the left seat.

Let's hear about that one.

Yeah.

So we're out on a range
over the North Sea,

and we had some RAF target out there
on a, on a range where we could,

you know, do the B2 33 practice bombs
on a little RAF raft out there

and you had to acquire it
by, by the ground mapping

radar in the turn to come on to it
because you can't see anything.

And of course the,
the North Sea on a typical day there

and the sky were indiscernible,
same color visibility.

You're not going to discern
a horizon out there.

So I really stressed
before we went into that turn.

Okay, I'm going to go in the radar scope.

But you fly this on instruments,
you do an instrument turn no more than

six degrees, bank

until I get the

target locked on at about 45 degrees
before we finish the turn.

And then you can follow the guidance
to on the heading to.

And then you can start
letting yourself down.

But don't go below 1000ft.

Don't go about six degrees. Bank.

Do not look outside.

Look directly on this
or flight as an instrument turn.

So I get down in the radar, which I'm not.

You know, I wasn't a Wiseau ever.

So I'm working all the manual knobs
and all.

I'm trying to figure out where this target
is and I'm not seeing anything.

And suddenly the hair
on the back of my neck

stands up and I think, get
out of the hood, you know what's going on?

And I look over
and he's got us at 135 degrees, bank

in about 40 degrees, nose low,

and we're well below 1000ft now,
and we're scorching toward the ocean.

And he's looking over the center being,
you know, where the gull wing canopies

trying to see the target. Oh, Lord.

And I just go, I got it, I got it,
I got it, and I took over the airplane.

I reached across him,
I threw the wings all the way forward.

I put it in full afterburner
after I got the nose headed back up.

So we're, we're we're cooking in
full afterburner

and I've got the stick all the way back.

We went to 7.3 G's,
which is the max it could do.

And I'm

right against the stops with both hands
just to hold it completely like this.

And I looked at the radar altimeter.

And we're going through 50ft very fast.

And I just knew when you'll
have 50ft, five zero feet.

The nose is pointed up.

But I just knew we didn't.

We weren't going to make it. Yeah.

And so literally

I mean,
we were certainly too low to eject.

And we were in a bad attitude
to try to eject the capsule.

Out of the car. There was no time. Yeah.

So I just closed my eyes
at that point and thought, okay.

Well comes. Here,
here comes the explosion.

You know, we're going to get vaporized.

And then I counted potatoes

and about 5 or 6 potatoes later
we hadn't exploded.

And of course, I'm holding the stick
perfectly centered with both hands.

And I opened my eyes
and we're climbing up through,

you know, several thousand feet

at 60 degrees,
nose up at that point in full afterburner.

And it shook me to

my core because, you know,
we almost died that day.

And yet, for some reason,
from some unknown source,

if I hadn't gotten my head
out of the radar, I

no wonder I wouldn't
find anything in the radar.

Looking out there at the space,
you know, not on the ocean,

but yeah, it was a
it was a big lesson for me.

And I had a few more instances,
including the one we talked

about a little bit,
where the F-16 blew up on the ramp.

That could have taken my life that day.

But in every case, somehow
I've been rescued or I've been saved.

And like I said, I don't see

as an aerospace engineer
and knowing the performance

capability of the F-111,
I didn't see any way

we were not going to hit the ocean
that day.

But we didn't.

We didn't hit anything
that we didn't even bend the tail cones.

We felt nothing.

We just got lifted up.

So yeah, my I wouldn't be here today
if it hadn't been

for a lot of intervention,
I think from the higher power.

And, and I feel very thankful for that
because

even though I got a lot of injuries
and I'm 100% permanent

and total disabled
because of all the lung damage,

but I get stem cells for that.

I have to pay for amount of pocket,
but I go to Panama and get stem

cell injections, mesenchymal stem cells,
which are adult stem cells

undifferentiated
that are in the umbilical cord.

So they're created during pregnancy
and they're very powerful.

We've all got those stem
cells. We're all born with them.

But you know, I'm 70 years old now.

How good you think my ones that
I was born with are they get worn out.

They're not as effective.

But these these new ones come in
and they basically transfer mitochondria

and get your cells working
and do all this healing.

It's not permanent

because the things that are inorganic
can't be removed without me trading lungs.

You don't have a lung transplant.

Not been willing to do that.

You know I might be sorry
to might be worth

talk about that story because
I mean that was quite fascinating as well.

I have I have some comments
I want to make on it just based off of

my experience in the jet.

But, would you mind sharing
what happened there?

Oh, sure. Yeah. So I'm.

How about Eglin Air Force Base?

And I'm getting ready
to take off for a test mission in F-16.

It's single seat, ready to go.

Everything's on time.

Coochie pulls the chalks.

I start out, I make a right turn.

Then I make a left turn onto the parallel
taxiway, heading down to the runway.

And a few feet after I made that left hand

turn,
just taxing the airplane along an idle.

Suddenly there's this massive explosion
sound and it can be in the cockpit.

And I didn't know what it was.

It didn't appear to be the engine
at the time, but immediately, you know,

I put the brakes on, stop the aircraft
stopped, cocked the throttle,

because if it was the engine,
I didn't want further things to happen.

And then I see a flame pool
developing from my right side, and it's

enveloping the airplane from the wheel
well forward, and it's spreading.

So I go to

raise the canopy to, to get out manually
because I could get out on the other side.

Then there wasn't a flame there yet,

and the canopy jammed and just stopped
and canopy runs on battery power.

What I didn't know at the time, but
later found out it was the main battery

in the aircraft,
which is the right wheel that exploded

and it severed a bunch of lines in there,
and that's what was leaking down

and creating the accelerant from the fire.

It was an electrical fire at first,
but I had no electrical power

now, especially after I shut down the main
engine, there's nothing now.

And the canopy stopped.

And then I went to manually turn this
crank where you could try to crank it up

and took 273 turns
to get it all the way up.

And I got about 5 or 6 turns into it
and suddenly it wouldn't turn anymore.

I mean, I could not, even with both hands,
force it to get any higher.

So the canopy is about that
far up off the rail.

And when the canopies jettison,
the rocket motors are in the front,

but they kind of depend on the plate
that it's against to help

accelerate it up,
because you get that blast feedback.

And I'm thinking, I probably couldn't

even jettison this canopy and not have it
just come right down on top of my head.

So, and well,
there's no canopy bow in that 16. Right?

So, you know,
when you first told the story to me,

I was thinking in my head
like I'd almost prefer to have,

you know, no canopy
or have it completely closed,

because if it was completely closed,
I would feel some confidence

that I could eject.

But if it's at some weird angle, you know,
is it going to blow off?

Yeah. In our system,
they break through the canopy.

Yeah. We don't have that.

Yeah, but, you know,
if it's not in the right position or,

you know, you can basically
just slam into it, right.

And it doesn't break.

And that's no way to know where to go.

Yeah. For sure.

So, you know, I'm
making the real time decision.

What do I do now?

And I didn't want to attempt a zero zero
ground ejection at that point because,

you know, oftentimes
you come down in the in the fire.

So much. Yeah, I can go wrong there.

And and plus, you know,

that probably would have hurt my back
enough not to be able to fly anymore.

Who knows what.

But all this is going through my mind.

And fortunately my crew chief saw

what was happening,
and I saw him reach down in his toolbox.

He got a speed handling
and put this special bit

that goes into the outside
for emergency egress, and he comes

sprinting like he's trying to win
some kind of Olympic event.

And the dude was flying.

He was going so fast.

He was running as hard as he could run.

And as he got close to the airplane,
he literally leaped up into the air

because it's quite a bit over the ground
in the airplane sitting up there,

and he managed to get his left hand
between the canopy and the rail.

That's probably at ten feet.

I mean, it's
no joke. It's not like the roof.

Trying to jump
up and grab a basketball now,

but he got his hand on
there and had enough strength to do a one

arm pull up to get

where he could take the speed handle
and jam it into the emergency egress board

and cranked it one handed
while he held his whole body weight up.

And of course, you can imagine
the adrenaline he's spending to do that.

And the flames are going bigger
all the time.

He doesn't know if the Jets going to blow
up. Well, he doesn't know.

You know.

He doesn't know. It
put himself in harm's way.

But as I see he's being successful in the
the canopy, the what he was doing,

it was coming up faster than it ever
came up on its electric motor.

So I quickly saved the seat on strapped
and got ready to do my ground egress.

And on the F-16,
because the canopy, you know,

you have the body bowing out quite a bit
when you come over the side

and you throw yourself over the side
and you're holding on to the rail,

you have to wait
because your feet will go up under that

and you don't want to let go then
because you'll come down on your tailbone.

So you let your feet come back under you,
then you let go.

And I mean, we practice this, but I never
had to do it for real until that day.

And I got ready to run. But I'm looking.

Where is my guy?

He's laying on the ground
and the flames are getting closer to him,

so I have to reach down and pick him
up, do the fireman's carry,

and he's dragging his toes
because he's got nothing.

He's burned up.

He couldn't even
he couldn't even get up on his own.

So he saved me.

And then I had to save him.

And we got we got away from the aircraft.

And by that time, of course, the tower,

even though I couldn't
get a radio call out,

they've seen the burning aircraft
on the ramp and they,

you know, they rolled the fire engines
and the ambulances.

And when we when we got up there

a little ways
away, a safe distance from the airplane,

the fire trucks were already on there
and they're spraying it down.

I think they saved the jet
and rebuilt it later.

They put him in one ambulance
and put me in a different one.

And then I never saw the guy again.

Really? Yeah.

I mean, to think of what he did that day
and the human courage.

It took the determination.

But what he did saved my life.

But what I what happened
is, of course, when you see fire,

you're trained to turn off the oxygen
regulator in the cockpit,

because otherwise, you know,
you got this flame hazard because oxygen

will really accelerate the fire
if it gets in the cockpit.

So I turned off my oxygen, breathing
what's coming in through the canopy.

Of course, my EPO,
which runs on hydrazine,

which is a very deadly thing,
and it's got a very high

percentage of ammonia in its exhaust,
which is very bad for your lungs.

Well, that has coming because there's a
right quartering tailwind.

It's bringing it right in the cockpit
because it's open just enough.

So I got that I got all this other
burning soot stuff coming in and I'm.

There fiberglass.

There's fiberglass,
there's whatever the hoses are made of.

There's rubber.

There's all kinds of compounds.
There's carbon fiber.

It's a nasty thing. It's like.

It's like I was in a burn pit,
but I'm sitting in the middle of it.

Yeah, I was okay for a while,
but at the slowly started making my lungs,

worse and worse.

So the first thing that showed up
when the docs was bronchiectasis,

that's a narrowing of the bronchial tubes.

Later asthma showed up.

And then I actually had pulmonary
sarcoidosis even before I retired.

But the docs missed it.

They misdiagnosed it.

They saw the swollen lymph
nodes, the nodes in my lungs,

and they thought it was an infomercial,
which was a cancer.

They ruled out lymphoma,
but they didn't have a second diagnosis,

so they just called it
reactive airway disease.

But clearly, from what I knew later
on in 2012, when they finally figured out

what I really had
was pulmonary sarcoidosis.

And as I mentioned to you,
a lot of the first responders

on nine over 11
that went into the burning rubble,

they developed this
for all the same reasons,

and many of them died
and they founded an autopsy.

Others lived for a while
and were being treated, but died anyway.

And then some were living with it,

as I have been so

very fortunate to still be alive.

But it did take me eventually
out of flying,

and I was on medical waivers
for a long time, but I was working

later.

I was I was the F-22 program manager,
and then I was

reassigned to the lab
to do directed energy weapons.

I was working for the secretary of the Air
Force for 1-1 priority national team.

I was leading a national team, and I had
enough endurance to get through all that.

But one day the docs came in and said,
well,

we've hit the limit of what
we can put you on medical waivers for us.

So either going to have an Be
and you'll be out immediately.

But we know you're working

for the secretary of the Air Force
right now in a special program.

So what I'd recommend is go ahead
and do a voluntary retirement,

and you can get another year
to finish that program.

And that'll stop the med process.

And I said that's a good choice.
So I did that.

I turned down my promotion to general,

because my health was deteriorating.

So anyway, that's how I got out.

And then I did consulting
for another 20 years after that, taught

directed energy weapons, helped develop
the ones who got now

even worked with the Navy on the ship
based ones.

Yeah.

And, of course, they've been employed
now in the Iran, in the Gulf out there.

And, that's really good because we
we had great excitement.

I think the Navy even has great excitement
about it, especially in nuclear

powered ships of the future
will have enough electricity.

When I got into this, the lab was doing
only chemical based lasers.

So they had chemical oxygen, iodine laser
for the 747, the airborne laser testbed.

And they were thinking, you know,
the Air Force by like 20 or 30 of these.

And and I said,
I don't see it for logistics reasons.

I don't see it as a war fighter
because the chemicals are deadly.

Then you got to have special places where
you're going to land and refuel them.

With these chemicals, people can die
just dealing with the chemicals.

If the chemicals
start leaking in the airplane,

everybody on board is going to die.

If the airplane crashes, anybody
within a five mile radius is going to die.

So I said, I just, I think, okay, great.

That will have a over a megawatt of laser
energy on a, on an ice beam

target to see if it's even possible
to burn through the missile case and boost

and have it blow up and the warhead
come down in their territory

instead of getting ours.

That was a worthy thing to look.

But I said I didn't see a fleet
of these ever.

And in fact, they didn't.

After it had a successful test program.

And think under Obama, he ordered
the airplane to go to the boneyard.

And then because Putin wanted it
cut up in little pieces,

they sort it up in a little pieces.

So they just destroyed everything there
so it couldn't be ever put back together.

So what's the alternative to chemical.

Fiber laser?

A fiber.

Fiber laser. Fiber laser system.

Fiber lasers have,
you know, like fiber optics.

There's cladding on the inside outer
perimeter

on the inside that lets light channel
through in the curves.

A fiber
laser has an inner cladding as well,

a core that reacts and produces the
the laser energy.

And in fact,

all the atoms start getting coherent
in the fire when you call up the fiber.

And anyway, the everybody laughed at me.

The the career laser physicist said,
no way that's ever going to work,

because Southampton University in the UK
was the leading

academic authority on fiber laser,
and they published a maximum theoretical

for a fiber laser
that was just not useful.

But I

my concept was but
I think we can get that to higher levels.

And if we gang them up,
if you take a bundle of those fibers,

say 50 or 100
or however big you want to make the laser,

you've got redundancy in the system
because individual fibers can go out

and it's like losing
pickles, pixels on a screen.

You know, you, you've got a
a backup for that.

Yeah.

And so I started I had a little seed
money, and I started a project with a guy

that actually used to work for Kelly
Johnson in the original skunkworks,

and he worked on the F-117
stealth fighter from Lockheed skunkworks.

And one of the problems with the stealth
fighter had been it had a rank up front.

You've probably seen the front of it.

There are those four tubes. Yeah,

p total for

measuring air data, which was critical

because the aircraft needed
a lot of feedback control

because it was the hopeless diamond shape,
not a good aerodynamic airplane.

But, but they used a derivative
of the F-16 flyby

or flight control system to make it work.

Anyway, that accounted for
about 90% of the radar signature it had.

And so he thought, well, if we could do

like a pulse gated laser

and measure random
dust particles in the atmosphere,

we can determine airspeed
without the need for those.

Interesting.

And they gave him an L 1011

Lockheed
L 1011 to instrument up and go try it.

And he used a gas laser like CO2 laser

just for trying to look at principles
to see if that worked.

And in fact, it did work.

It worked extremely accuracy accurate.

But then,

you know, there was no way to fit
all that into,

two and a half, 117.

But he left.

Lockheed started his own company
called Optical Air Data Systems,

and when I found him,
I came with a proposition

because he was already working
fiber lasers

to try to get that capability
in a smaller package.

And so I gave him some seed money
in about 6 to 8 months.

He came up with a three loops, one feeds
the next, feeds the next.

And after those six months

of trials in the lab,
we were able to exceed

the theoretical maximum
for a single fiber by over ten.

Oh, excuse me, 100 fold.

So yeah, two orders of magnitude.

And that finally got the laser physicist
at at

Wright-Patterson interested to come down
and do a double check on all this.

And then that started,

the era of this.

I said, here's what's good about it.

All you have to feed it is electricity.

And you can store up
the electricity in batteries.

If you don't have a generator big enough,

if it's ground based,
then you could probably generate it all.

If it's in a vehicle like a tank
or a track vehicle or something,

they've got big,

you know, diesel or even turbine engines
that can generate a lot of stuff.

So the concept was pretty solid.

And eventually industry
started moving in that direction.

And now everybody that's doing
lasers is doing fiber lasers.

And they've made incredible strides.

I was working with the Navy on, you know,
they were trying

to get to a 500 kilowatt laser.

And it was going
to be a coherently formed,

you know,
how just to explain this for a little bit,

if you want to phase
all those different fiber bundles,

then you remember how, I don't know,
you're not old enough to remember the days

when radios drifted off the station
constantly having to bring them back.

I'm not.

That was solved with a circuitry
called superheterodyne feedback loop,

and they were able to stabilize
so that you could,

you know, digitally go to a radio station.

And they never drifted off.

And you can apply those same principles
to controlling the phasing of the light.

And that was something
I thought about a lot earlier on.

And finally, it was

MIT Lincoln Lab that started super
like putting some effort in.

I funded a project to see
if we could do it with 6 or 7 fibers,

and that was successful.

And then that's been scaled up.

So now you have coherently combined,
which is is really good.

That's probably the best mean quality
you can get,

but we can incoherently combine them
through

multi-layer
multilayer dielectric in the optic loop.

And what it does is
it doesn't make it fully coherent,

but it brings the beams together.

So it's almost that much beam quality.

So the spectral beam combining,
which is what that's called,

is a method
that preserves all the redundancy

of each of those individual fibers.

Whereas the coherent

if your coherent combiner goes out,
your whole laser goes down, you know.

So anyway, they're kind of playing around
with both of those.

And Navy's
looking at both those capabilities.

The ones that are out in the field
now on ships are all,

spectral beam combined lasers,
but they're still working

with MIT Lincoln Labs
to come up with an even greater power.

And I worked with the chief
of Naval operations at that time.

He really became a proponent of it
because he could see the value.

You know,
you look at these 30,000, $20,000 drones

at their firing at the Navy,
and you spend a 2 or $3 million

missile out of a vertical launch tube
that can't be replenished at sea.

It's sort of a bad cost trade,
but take you

about $3.50 of electricity
to take the take the drones out.

Yeah, unlimited ammunition, essentially.

Limited magazine.

Is that so important where, you know,
maybe just to put a bow on the laser side,

where do you where do you see this
technology capping out in the near term?

You know, as far as,

the power
of the system, the size of the systems.

Are we on a trend
where these are continue to get smaller

and more powerful,
or do you think we are in the world?

What's nice when you get big
industry involved and they start working

with subcontractors
for the various components

they started going
after overall efficiency of the laser.

Now lasers were at 5% efficiency from wall
plug to laser power output.

We got it to 15% with those early fiber
laser things, which was groundbreaking.

Yeah,
but the last I checked, it's at 49% now.

Oh, wow.

You still got a lot of waste heat.

You got to do something with it.

But the beauty of the Navy is
they got seawater.

They can circulate through as a
as a heat absorber.

So. Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm really excited about the Navy solution
to put it on an airplane.

It's still challenging,
but we're getting closer.

Maybe the f 47 will have it.

I don't know,
because I'm not read into that program.

They keep.

You always hear rumors about that
being a technology that goes on even,

you know, perhaps not not to be shooting,
you know, be a 40,000ft in the

to shoot down or to shoot a building
on the ground or an aircraft

100 miles away, but even has like a close
in defense system from other missiles.

Exactly.

I think that's that's our goal right now
is a defensive capability,

which would avoid, depending
solely on electronic warfare means.

And because they,
they also kind of give you away if you're

in a stealth airplane.

So I don't know where that's going to go,
but it's come a long way.

And to see now if you talk to Lockheed

or Boeing or Northrop Grumman,
they're all doing fiber lasers.

And and it's good to have competition
there as well,

because they're each trying to drive
greater and greater efficiencies, more

and more final power output, greater
being quality.

And the breakthroughs have been amazing.

So it was tough teaching it
because I kept having to update courses

literally a few months away,
and I have to go and update

all my PowerPoint to give the latest
and latest on the students.

But the first course I developed for them,
and I guess they had had some

of the laser physicists trying to go out
and teach warfighters about this.

The problem

is, the laser physicists have been in

an academic kind of environment,
almost their own life,

and they're used to showing equations
and improving their work

with these equations.

And you got guys, you know, like enlisted
people that didn't have any of

that kind of Stem
education, science, technology,

engineering and math.

They don't have that.

And a lot of the fighter pilots
don't have that,

don't need it to be a fighter pilot.

So they finally realized
because they just went over their heads

and get them walk out of the room.
So it wasn't effective.

So they they knew that I had a background
as a fighter pilot and a test pilot.

So they finally asked me to stay on
after I retired and helped them

develop this and start developing
courseware to teach the warfighters.

So I made it very warfighter oriented
and it was received very well.

The first one we did
was a classified course

at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey,

and they had a big classified auditorium,

and it was filled with a lot of naval guys
because,

you know, they're going to school there
and they're kind of captive audience.

But we had army guys,
we had airforce people.

We had a lot of uniformed people
in that group and the big stadium,

auditoriums, style auditorium,

and it was extremely well received.

So then it just like continued
like you got to keep doing this.

So I did that for most of my retirement,
keep building courses and teaching.

Eventually
they sent me over to the Centcom,

and I went to Europe and I went to
Africom, and I went to Indo Packham

and we had a shorter course

that's about like a 30 minute,
but it would usually expand

because the generals
have a lot of questions.

So a briefing then goes,
we try to compress it.

The course we did for

the work was a four hour course,
because that's about all you could absorb.

And we have breaks in there, of course,
but really enjoyed doing that.

And I, I'm really thankful.

I mean, my career is kind of weird
because it took so many different turns.

Well, jealous of in a lot of ways.

I mean, you got to work on, you know,

the very cutting edge technology,
working with new programs

in a lot of ways,
that's where I envisioned myself going.

If I had been able to succeed
in getting into test pilot school,

I necessarily failed.

But I was injured during my application
window, so I was, oh, medically,

I was medically down and I needed to be
in a flight status to apply in the Navy.

And so I kind of missed my window.

Which was a bummer.

But you have made a good one, man,
because I seen how your brain works.

You've been a great test pilot.
I think so.

I think so, but, found another calling
you could say.

Yeah.

I think we've established
you have some aviation experience,

some technical know how.

Let's kind of switch gears here
into into the world a little bit.

I know
you've had some experiences in the past,

but what really kind of like said,
all right,

this is something I'm willing to share.
And maybe you did.

Maybe you shared it
in your career in the past.

Maybe no one listened.

I don't know,

maybe you can kind of give us some insight
to without going into them yet.

Just kind of like how you decided to start
speaking about this.

Yeah.

Well, I,
I certainly held my first encounter.

To myself for nearly 45 years.

And it was because the stigma,
especially in the Air Force, was so bad

and I was enjoying what I was doing,
which we've just gone

through in my second career
after I retired from active duty.

And because of that,
I didn't want to take a chance.

And certainly I wouldn't have taken
a chance in real time back in 1980.

Yeah, December 26th and 1980,

because when you're in Personnel
Reliability program,

you're under like a psych care.

If they have any thing,
they want to get you out of there,

then they they basically tell the psych
a marking crazy and he's out.

So it could have threatened
my entire flying career,

especially the stigma was so bad
back then.

So I didn't tell a soul.

It's kind of thing
though, that you, you don't forget.

It's just to

I don't know.

It's a big ontological kind of shock.

I mean we had to memorize
because this was during the Cold War.

We had to memorize every silhouette
of every kind of rotorcraft

and jet fighter or whatever,
even transports for the Soviet Union.

We had to know all the NATO aircraft,
and we got tested on that regularly.

So, you know,

that was something that
that certainly came into play

when I'm trying to analyze
this, this thing.

But yeah, it was just the stigma. And,

and I was still on a top secret
even in my second career.

And I was enjoying and thought it was
important to keep doing what I'm doing.

So it wasn't important enough
to stop that work, to talk about it.

So when you and I first talked,
it was again, you kept it private.

And you got me in the interview
with the FBI.

And they kept it private until recently.

They contacted me under the president's
order in mind, if we released this story,

we can leave your name out.

I said, yeah, you can.

You can release it all now. So,

it's been a gradual

transition,
but I think it's a very important topic.

It's one that maybe not
everybody still believes in.

And I know not everybody
has had an experience or close encounter.

But when you do, and especially
if you have an aerospace background,

it really begins to get your mind
chunking on how is it doing that?

How does it perform what it's doing?

Because it's certainly beyond any physics
that we currently have as acknowledged.

Not that maybe somebody knows,

I don't know.

But anyway, yeah, that's that's really why

I kept it secret
like most military pilots do.

Yeah. And I was just doing some mental
math while you were talking.

You came to Americans for Safe Aerospace,

may, I think 27th of 2023, which was about

a month or so

before I ended up testifying for Congress
in July

and of July 2023, and only months

after that organization was formed.

Yeah. Well, thank you.

So thank you for coming forward
for a while. And like you said, I agree.

I think, you know, many pilots
don't feel comfortable talking about this

even today.

What kind of triggered you to come forward
though, you know, I mean,

was there
something you had saw in the news or

did you just feel like I'm out of it now
and I'm hearing about it?

Maybe it's time. Exactly.

I started to see
sort of a momentum developing.

I think that as people started
coming forward

that had been on the inside

and particularly seeing David Greene
come forward, what a brave soul he is.

And of course, he interviewed
with you on that,

that same thing on the testimony
in front of Congress.

I thought, well, it is important
to come forward, especially as a pilot.

Now, I never had a near miss
in flight like some of your,

I guess, fellow

aviators did, doing
training on out over the Atlantic.

But David Favors story

really catalyzed a lot for me.

It was he
and you going in front of Congress.

And that, I think, showed

that pilots can and should tell
what they've seen and experienced.

And so since I finally fully retired,

I thought, what have I got to lose?

What am I what am I holding back for now?

I'd say it's just years of thinking
nobody could ever know.

I can't even tell my wife.

I just was afraid
of what the consequences would be,

because my aviation career was
was very meaningful for me.

In fact,

there was never a time when I flew that
I didn't have the conscious thought.

I can't believe they actually paid me
to do this.

Yeah, when you're in a job like that

and you feel like it's an important job
for the nation,

there's a service, there's
this camaraderie, there's this whole,

as you know, particularly as fighter

pilots, there's this thing where your
your lives are dependent on each other.

And so your teammates and your formation,
your, your teammates in whatever

squadron or unit you're in,
you form a bond that's like nothing else

because you are putting yourself
at risk at all times, even in training.

And, you know, I lost almost 35,
something like 33

friends and colleagues during mostly
during my test piloting days.

So test piloting is very hard risk
because there's unknown unknowns

and you never know
if you're going to encounter with them.

You go after the known unknowns,
but there's unknown unknowns

because it's a very nonlinear environment

in the atmosphere
and supersonic and stuff, and people die.

And I was willing to take that risk
and advance on.

But still,

it's sobering.

And you never really get over
when those happen

because there's such a deep friendship
with camaraderie.

Well, let's let's hear
about your first experience.

Yeah. So I was,

I was the youngest guy in a
go to F-111 at RAF Upper Heyford.

It was kind of a trial thing.

We went straight to the left seat.

In the past, you had to go, you know,
spend time in the right seat as a p.

Oh, you needed at least two airplanes.

You needed over like $1,500 one time.

I didn't have any of that.

And they decided
because they were so short of aircraft

commanders, to fly in the left seat
and pilot the thing that they took

a chance on guys
coming right out of pilot training.

And I relished the idea, in fact,
so much so

I did well in fighter lead in training,
where you do

a lot of your air to air gunnery
and air to ground stuff in a T-38 B,

which had a HUD, and you could release
some BDU, small 25 pound

practice bombs that weren't explosive.

And because I had done well in that,
they came to me and they said,

we think of me, better
to put you in an f 15, because I did.

I didn't win Top Gun at my class.

And and I thought about that, but

it was going to take an educational delay
or just a delay

in casual status for a year
before they can get me into training.

And here I had this opportunity to go on.

Airplane was the first variable
sweep wing,

automatic terrain
following radar and stuff.

And as I thought about it,
I said it would be cool to fly the F-15,

but I think the the technology
and capabilities of this airplane

are really speaking to my aerospace
engineering background.

So I turned down the F-15
and went straight on, then to my F

for 111 assignment and never looked back
and thought that was a wrong decision.

Really enjoyed playing the airplane.

We did a lot of low altitude
both day and night

on the terrain
following radar and ground mapping.

We didn't have an air to air radar
with the crap.

We could barely track
our flight lead in weather,

so it wasn't an air to air design machine
the way the B model would have been.

But for air to ground
and the ground mapping

and the terrain following radar system,
the first of its kind.

It was a beast.

You could go super fast,
you could go supersonic,

you could exceed Mach 1.2,
you know, at Treetop Heights.

And it had 34,000 pounds of internal JPA.

So it was really

amazingly long legged airplane
and fun to fly.

So I'm doing
my first year took about six months

to be fully certified
as a NATO combat pilot.

And of course, you're flying in the
I co, the International Civil

Air Organization,
a little bit different rules from the FAA.

So you had to really get all of that down.

But then once you're certified,
you're also then sitting full alert.

And our alert was called vector alert.

And we set with B61 thermonuclear weapons

loaded in the bomb bays and wings.

And if the Cold War had turned into a hot
war, those alert jets would be

the first to go there and try to take out
the most critical targets.

It was a frightening kind of thought.

Yeah, that time we could be scrambling.

Fortunately, that never happened.

But because I was the young guy, the
youngest guy in the squadron, the newbie,

I got the privilege of sitting on alerts

that took up holidays
like Thanksgiving and Christmas, so I did.

I had done Thanksgiving,
and now it's Christmas time.

So I did the Christmas tour.

I didn't I didn't never say no.

It's like, okay,
I got to pay my dues. Yeah.

And so on December 26th, that Friday,

the day after Christmas, was
when our changeover was and

I was coming back from the base,
I took a little time to go

see some of my squadron mates
at the Jan D's bar on base.

Talked to them for a little bit.

Of course, I'm driving myself
home in my Corvette, so I don't want to

get a DUI, and that would also
take me out of the cockpit.

So I might have had half a beer
if I had anything, but I just

basically were singing some fighter
pilot songs

and just being glad to be out of there and
and going home.

So around 10:00 it's one more encounter
came and it was I lived off base.

There wasn't enough size on RAF Upper
Heyford to have base housing

for anybody
but the like the commanders and stuff.

And so the rest of us where we had
kind of like a little America off

base that we went to

and it

was not a long
drive, maybe 15 minutes from the base,

but this one road that I needed to take
was very desolate woods on both sides.

And there was a golf course on my right
as I'm passing.

And I knew about it
because I'd gone out there

with some of the guys and tried to play
golf.

Not very good at it, but anyway,
I knew what was on the other side

of this tree lines
a golf course and I'm all alone.

There's nobody coming at me.

There's nobody behind me.

And of course, I'm in a left hand drive

American car and driving on British roads
on the left hand side of the road.

And so that took some getting used to. But

as I'm

driving, I noticed in my rearview mirror
some really strange looking lights

that are coming in very fast
from behind me,

and they come to beam me,

and it just stops instantly

and stops

and I.

I stopped my car and pulled off.

I actually crossed the lane.

There was nobody coming

and pulled off on the right
side of the road to be closest to the.

There's some trees that are kind of like
guard trees and most golf courses have.

So if you hit a ball

where and it doesn't hopefully
get all the way through to the road.

But this thing was hovering
just above those trees

and over the golf course.

It was making no sound whatsoever
at first.

I just sat in the car
and just looked at it through the windows.

Roll the window down and

I'm listening for sounds.

I can't figure out what this thing is.

So I get out of. My car.
Any sounds at all?

No, that was just silence.

Just silence.

Which was kind of weird. Then

I stood out behind my Corvette,
looking at it,

and then something possessed me
to start walking toward it.

At this point, when I got to the closest

I got, I would say it's about.

150ft,

and it appeared to be about 50
to 60ft long.

It was sort of a triangular shape,
but more rounded on the front,

more angular on the back,

but sort of around the bottom
and side of this craft

was all of this changing lights,
different colors of light,

and it was constantly
morphing and changing.

The lights.

Yeah, it's like a field.

Or was it like fixed lights?

It wasn't like kind of.

Yeah. No, it was more like a field.

What if what it reminded me was a plasma
or like, you know, where you have

the aurora borealis or the aurora Astralis
with the sun's electromagnetic energy

coming in as plasma into our atmosphere
and ionizing various gases.

That's what it seemed to be like.

But it wasn't, you know,

there was no sound whatsoever,
but it was just constantly changing.

And it wasn't like
there were little lights changing.

So as I had started walking toward it,

it began to descend.

And then at first
I'm thinking as a fighter pilot,

maybe they'll let me take this thing
for a spin.

But I didn't know what it was.

I didn't even know
if there was any body in it or anything.

I didn't see any occupants and I didn't.

It didn't ever, ever actually land.

At least I didn't stay around long enough.

But as I'm having that thought
and then all of a sudden

I go, wait a minute,
nobody has seen me out here.

This is genuinely a UFO.

It's not anything I can describe
other than that.

Or as we would now call it, a

anomalous phenomenon.

But in the day,
the vernacular would have been UFO.

And I knew it was death.

In your career, if you told somebody
you had a UFO sighting, especially

in the situation I'm in.

So I quickly
decided, no, my best course of action.

Because if that is some sort of ionization
of the air through some sort of plasma,

might not be so safe
to get within close range of it.

So from my own protection,
both physically from whatever that is,

as well as mentally for my career,

I headed back to my car,
got in and went on back home.

I didn't tell a soul.

43 years passed
before I talked to you about it.

And again, that was a private video

that we had back and forth. But,

yeah, I decided

it was time to at least tell you,

and I didn't have another
sighting of any kind until

about ten years later.

It was 1990.

Well, that's before you
before you go into the next one,

I want to just maybe
pick a little bit on some questions here.

Sure.

When, when that those lights you saw
in your rearview mirror approach did you.

And went off over the golf course,
did you interpret those lights

that you saw in the back
as being that plasma field,

or do you think like some headlights,
if you will, that were on front of that?

Yeah.

You know,

I'm looking in the rearview mirror
in the back glass through the Corvette.

I wasn't looking directly at it,
so I don't know what it was.

I thought at first, maybe
it's a helicopter because it stopped,

but I never seen a helicopter

with that kind of a display,
and certainly not that kind of a shape.

After I got out and really got a closer
look at it.

The color of it, the craft itself.

It was just for, as I could tell,
it was black because it was a dark night.

It was 10:00 at night.

It was colorless for for all
except this perimeter.

Constantly changing colors.

Could you see any type of a cockpit?

I couldn't, but I had a view,
you know, looking up to it.

And not from the direct front angle.

I know there was
there was a guy who went on the Earth

files show that I saw sometime

later as all this started to develop,

and that was Linda moulton
household show about UFO things.

And he was stationary up Upper Heyford
and he was telling of an encounter

right over the weapons storage area
while he was guarding some weapons.

And he got to see a front on at eye level

because he was on a little bit of a knoll.

And as he's walking his century,
he had a rifle sling rifle

on his shoulder.

He's guarding some weapons.

Before they were going to put him,
lock him in the store journey.

So he's waiting on the weapons
people to come and take the weapons,

and he's just guarding them
and he's going back and forth.

It was a peaceful night.

No problem.

In one time
he turns to go back the other way.

And there's this thing
just sitting there silent,

and he described the same kind
of changing colors under it,

and he said that he could see
through the front of it at that point.

And there were these like, transparencies.

But he didn't see any beings.

But he said it appeared like
the light inside was coming from the floor

to the ceiling,
as opposed from the ceiling down.

And he had a pretty,
pretty accurate description of it.

And I was amazed
because I had never heard that there was.

He wasn't the only one on RF Upper
Heyford that saw it.

And so there have been a number
of people that come, come

and admit that.

But he was using an alias name
and an altered voice.

And at the end of that show, Linda moulton
Howell

said, if anybody else has seen

had an encounter in this time frame,

please contact me on ProtonMail.

I didn't have an account like that before,
but I established one

and I sent her a proton mail about it,

and she then replied back and said,

would
would I mind if she had my phone number?

So I gave her my phone number
and then about a week or so passed

and I happened to be in San Antonio,
Texas,

teaching directed energy weapons,
and I'd spent all day teaching.

I think I had two for our courses
that Monday, and that money evening

went on back in my hotel room.

The phone rings
and it's Linda moulton House,

and we had about a two hour discussion,
and she wanted me to come on Earth Files,

and she would give me a disguised name
and disguise my voice and all, and I said,

I'm just not willing to do that
at this point

because this is, you know,

I'm on a contract to do this work,
and it takes a top secret clearance, and

I don't want to risk any of that right now
because it's an important work.

And she she accepted that and never,
never outed me.

But yeah, I had told her about it
because of her show,

and she kind of logged in her show
that RF Alconbury,

which was a little north of Heyford,
had had sightings that very night to

and a similar and description
in all of them.

So and there was one other base
and I remember the one might have been

RAF Croughton, but
there were several bases in the vicinity.

And so this is more on the west side.

Like RF

Upper Heyford is 12 miles north of Oxford,
England, whereas the forest incident

that's happened at the same
time is over on the East coast.

And so I never knew about those

until that came out
publicly many years later.

But with Linda moulton,
how she was kind of putting it together,

this was a bigger deal than just

the rentals from Forest and Bentwaters
Woodbridge bases.

And of course, they were the that's
the largest nuclear storage in all of NATO

was there had been Warner's, Woodbridge,
and they were over

the weapons storage area
just like it ended up in in the woods.

So the guy at Upper Heyford said,
you know, when the weapons guys

got that first guy got there, he looks up
and he goes, no, no, one of ours.

He got in the truck
and just left the guy out there alone.

Yeah.

And he never, you know, gotten
he never abandoned his post.

And then when the weapons guys came out
and they put the weapons in the thing

then moved and was hovering
directly over him pretty low

when they came out of the bunkers
to put the weapons away.

And then it never moved really fast.

It just noiselessly moved away.

But he saw it

from underneath and he saw it from front
almost directly.

And I'm all level with it
because of the berm he was on.

So it was an interesting account in

after having my count,
I never talked that guy,

and we never heard a word about there
being an encounter on the base.

So yeah, that
that really intrigued my mind

that this, this thing that we knew
as Rendlesham Forest incident, a.

Much. Bigger event, much bigger than,

and why and the timing, who knows?

Do you recall the color of the light
underneath the craft?

Yeah, I was, there.

It was never, like, a solid color,
but it was like these floating between,

more purplish lights
and sometimes a more reddish, light

and yellowish, occasional green issue.

It was quite a spectrum of colors and
they were constantly doing differently.

And so that's why

I don't have any technical knowledge
of the craft obviously.

But in my mind, you know, because it had

no visible means of propelling itself.

I mean I've certainly seen a lot of AV
eight B

and even the F-35b do.

They're hovering at the air show
and that's quite loud.

Yeah. That's what I was thinking.

You can tell how that thing is working
just by listening to it.

And even a helicopter is very loud
when the rotors are gone

and there was no rotors, there was
no rotor noise, there was just silence.

That's what was so slumping about it.

And that's why I'm thinking then
how is it propelling itself?

It has to be using a force
that could repel

the interact with and not not allow
the gravity to bring it down.

And you know, I was certainly aware
that the electromagnetic force

is ten to the 39th power
greater than gravity.

Yeah.

So in my technical mind
electromagnetic something.

Could be the

answer
to how you could not have anti-gravity

so much as just be able to resist gravity,

maybe reduce your inertial mass.

And, and then have it be able to

propel you by a completely unknown

to us, at least technically at that point.

And I've thought a lot.

Could that have been one of our craft
that we reverse engineered.

But then why would it be doing that
particularly, you know

appearing over bases and weapons
storage areas.

And why would we put, put it to be seen.

I know where they test
those kinds of things.

If we do test those kinds of things and,
and that's why we have that.

Place not over golf courses.

No it's not different golf courses.

So yeah, I kind of quickly

ruled out that that's not what it was.

So what it is, who knows.

It's anomalous.

You might be interested to learn,

you know,

people are still seeing things
of similar shapes, right?

Black triangles, of course.

And even I think it was 2022 or 2023,

a pilot had a near midair
with one of these black triangles.

As he was leaving Johannesburg,
South Africa. Wow.

He was climbing through

29,000ft, getting ready to level off.

Sees a black triangle off
his nose, basically looks to his copilot,

looks at his sensors.

It comes back into things right there.

They have a 100ft pass.

That's close. Yes.

I mean, especially in a seven, three,
seven style aircraft where the vertical,

you know, stabilizers, you know.

Was that 40ft?

I don't know exactly, but,

you know,

there's not a lot of room
for he actually braced

because he thought
it was going to hit their tail.

Oh my God.

Fully loaded passenger jet.

And, he described the same thing
as, as others have, as well as essentially

what he interpreted, almost like a plasma
field on the bottom of it, really.

And others have described

similarly as copilot SA as well,
of course.

And, they described it as gold.

It was kind of a yellowish
and gold and shimmering

and almost gave the impression
of like a reentry vehicle of sorts.

So I asked a question about the color.
Yeah.

Unfortunately, I did not see color
because it was just such a dark night.

There were no lights out there on the golf
course, and, well, this headlights.

Of the field, if you will, the.

Yeah.

Like the colors
that you described in that field.

He basically described

the same type of field like dynamics,
but it was more yellowish okay.

Gold colored.

Yeah.

And I would think that if it was plasma
generated, it would depend a lot on

what's in the atmosphere. What. Yeah.

What it's reacting to
you know what it's creating.

To luminescent like that.

Kind of like the aurora

borealis changes quite a bit depending on
how far it penetrates in the atmosphere

in which gases it's actually suddenly

charging. Exciting.

Yeah.

Well, anything else from that report
that you might remember?

Any other sensations or feelings even,
you know, I mean, did it.

Did you feel like it was landing for you
in some sense?

You know, I mean, well.

I couldn't see there was nothing out there
on the golf course

that would make sense for it
to be stopping over.

Not like it was probably interested
in playing around the golf.

So I'm the only thing on the highway,

and it was coming from the direction
of Upper Heyford.

But the guy that had the signing at

Heyford was an hour
and like 115 in the morning.

So that's three hours,
15 minutes after my sighting.

So his sighting
was on the early hours of the 27th.

So it was after midnight.

Mine was on the late
evening of the 26th at 10 p.m..

So why it was coming from that direction,
I don't know.

And why it stopped by me.

I don't know, unless there was curiosity
from the craft about because,

you know, I was a red Corvette
wasn't common on the roads of England.

It was.

Maybe it just saw it as an unusual vehicle

because it's, you know, it's
so streamlined looking, sloped back and.

Maybe, who knows, you're so isolated it
perceived you as an opportunity of sorts.

Maybe. For what end?

Do you feel like you got out of your car
purely for your curiosity reasons?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, it was a

my mind's immediately
just trying to figure it out.

What is this?

It didn't
it wasn't anything from the Soviet Union.

It wasn't anything from NATO.

It wasn't any kind of flying vehicle
that I was familiar with at all.

And it didn't.

It wasn't like a helicopter at all either.

Just to kind of put it into the listeners
or viewers perspective.

You know, as you're as you're

this close to when you're looking up,
like how how much space did it take up in

your field of view, you know, to be like
holding a skateboard in your hand or.

Like, well, like that
maybe from my field of view

and I don't know exactly where it was.

I didn't know it was beyond
that first level of trees.

And there's probably some other
trees on the other side.

I don't know the exact hole it was over

because it was probably
it was either a fairway or a hole.

It only played that golf course once.

Are you aware of the Air Force

putting bunkers or weapons
storage under golf courses?

Wouldn't surprise me. No.

Not aware of that.

There is a golf course on the Navy.

Likes a joke that there.

You know, the Air Force is very proud
of their golf courses.

And they have one in every base,
no matter where you go.

So maybe they're dual purpose.

You know, it's a convenient

excuse to dig up a lot of land and rework
it perhaps, or something there.

Interesting theory.

Interesting. Yeah.

Did it illuminate the ground at all
or any the surroundings?

Do you recall?

No. It wasn't like it was casting light.

It wasn't like beams of light.

Yeah, it was just these changing colors.

They weren't like normal red, white
and blue like you would see,

you know, from, from lights.

And it wasn't from my perspective
it wasn't illuminating the trees

or anything.

It was rather a dark craft.

Other than that

all I could see

was the outline
it made because of the color

was going around the bottom
and perhaps up on the side some.

I don't know where
whatever it's doing was emanating from,

but you couldn't hear any, like,

gas being released to pressurized air.

Nothing like that.

It was just totally silent.

And of course, my hearing
was really good at that point

because I'm just starting my fighter
pilot career.

Not so good now.

But yeah, that was
that was very distinct to me.

And I think
just just the overall curiosity,

you know, I wasn't scared of it at first.

I was just incredibly curious,

until I realized that curiosity could,
could lose my career if anybody knew.

And I told anybody, so I didn't. It's,

not your actions, but just
generally shameful that we, as a species,

as a humanity, were in a position
where we had to hide such information.

I agree of such importance, potentially.

You know, if you read all the stuff
that was a CIA directive,

you know, and maybe the people
on the inside of the program,

in fact, they've often used,

people thinking they saw a UFO out at area

51 and used it to their effect
to hide things

like the F-117 doing test
flying and so forth.

And I was never stationed there.

But I've been out there because I was on
some unacknowledged SAP programs that,

the use APS, the unacknowledged
special access programs that are bigoted.

And and you have very few people ran in.

But then when you're out there,
they put these goggles and stuff on you,

and you can only see
how to walk straight ahead.

And they're gardening with rifles and,
you know,

you're not allowed to see anything
that's not part of what you're there for.

And clear to super, super secret place,
a very interesting place. But

yeah,

it's weird that I had
and that was during my F-16 program thing.

We were developing the technology
for the block 50,

and some of that was
being developed out there, and it was not

common knowledge, the capabilities
that airplane was going to have.

But we also had some special weapons
that were being developed later

as the commander at Hill Air Force Base,

my unit has C-130 that one regularly

take supplies out there to them
from other countries for various purposes.

And I've flown to those guys.

But we had we had a gift that was tracking
one of the very advanced

cruise missile programs
that was in developed at that time,

and that was all being done out there.

So yeah, my I've had back and forth
when they offered me a job at one point.

And so I went and did
all the light of tests and stuff and then,

but then the four star general decided
he had other things he wanted me to do.

So they sent me to another school.

You know, the Air Force put me through 12
different colleges and universities,

paid for it all
and all these extra degrees.

What do you use?
What do you need that for?

But I mean, they used all that stuff.

They put me through school full
and I always love learning.

So I didn't mind.

Take a year off line and go to school.

Sounds like an ideal career to me.

Well it was,
it was one that I think with your brain

in the way
you think is so, so much like mine.

Yeah, I always enjoyed learning new stuff
and I loved getting

into the engineering details and stuff.

But when you have that kind of a mind
and you and you invent things,

because I invented a lot of stuff
that helped flying.

I did the first ever computerized flight
program for for planning, flight planning,

and it took us

a good four hours before that to manually
do everything and calculate everything.

And then you had your stubby pencil
on your card.

I made it so it could be done
in 45 minutes on a Atari 800 computer,

which was the first production
small that ran on

what was a basic language,
and the only language I had had military

was in grad school.

That was not basic. It was.

What was the Fortran 14?

Yeah, yeah.
And this was nothing like that.

But we didn't have to do punch cards
to program this little mini computer.

And I worked like around the clock
for days and nights making that happen.

I took some time off on a Friday
and a Monday and worked all weekend

and and got it working
and then asked me, could I bring it in?

And of course, the old guys didn't
want anything to do with it because,

you know, yeah, gimmick thing.

Especially back then.

But somebody used to integrating
with new tech really.

Some of the young whiz I was
then had just come out of a,

you know, their training and,
and their new to the jet.

They were curious about it because they,

they knew something about computers
at that point.

And I remember the first guy
that that did his flight planning,

and he goes, 45 minutes
and I've got my card.

It's all for him.

But the hardest thing was coming up
with how to digitize

all of those tables in the back
for various bomb loads and drag indices.

And because those were like all of these
weird interpolation, bring these

two points together and interpolate
the lines and come up with a number.

So it was kind of intensive
to go through that, but to take all that

and turn it into digital code,
I had to go buy a

dedicated book on polynomials
and finally figured out the right

polynomials
to do the math to make it come out.

And then I would test flight, and
before I ever let anybody know about it

and compare it to the manual calculations
and stuff, and it was dead on accurate.

I had put in a great circle navigation.

So all the navigation stuff,

even the turn radius,
everything just matched perfectly.

So when I was finally happy with it,
you know, put my my squadron

commander, let me put it in a squadron
and they started using it.

And then I couldn't get my computer back.

So eventually the other squadrons
one on one too.

So I talked to him and went up to the wing
commander and said,

if you'll give me permission
with the contracting folks to,

I'll tell them what computers to buy,
and I'll put the code in them.

And every squadron can have one of these,

and maybe I can take my computer back
home with me.

So they did all that
and all the squadrons had that.

And later I did a information system
because we used to get the frag,

I don't know what the court in the Navy,
but it was a fragmentary order of battle.

So headquarters, Usafe,
you would send out this thing by teletype,

and the only teletype machine
was in the command post,

and then they would rip off sections of it
and hand it to a sergeant,

and he'd get in a pickup truck
and drive around the perimeter road

to deliver each squadron its things.

And I thought, how well is this
going to work if we're under attack?

Yeah.

So I got to thinking,
how do we how do we digitize this?

And we had these secure phone lines,
but they didn't

run on a network that went off the base
that were underground on the base,

very secure.

We could talk any classified over them,
and they only connected

between the command post
and each of the squadrons

when they were
working in our bunkered area.

So I decided

they had just come out with this new thing
called a modulator demodulator,

a modem where you could do
a acoustic coupler with a phone.

So I went to the wing Commander and said,
you know, mine,

I'd like to get your contracting folks
to allow me

to buy some things off the economy,
because it leaned a couple

to the British style headset or,
you know, handset for the phone.

And he let me work on that.

And I actually did this
computerized information system.

It allowed us to take the frag
and send it, digitize it,

and then analog
analog it to go on the phone lines

and then undo it on
the other end are taking that analog

and make it digital and have a printer
that would print it all out real fast.

So it came electronically,
and yet you could still

have your fragmentary order of battle
right there in the unit.

Sounds like fax machine.

Yeah, kind of like that.

Well, it's incredible,

you know, hearing you talk about kind
of the state of technology at this time,

while you're also observing what appeared
to be extremely advanced craft.

Not familiar with.

I interrupted you before
when you were about to zip ahead

ten years to talk about your
your second experience.

Maybe we can jump into that now.