A shining black triangle, bigger than a warship, hanging motionless over a moving cruiser. Red, blue, and green lights at its corners. Then, in an instant, it was eight miles away.
Ricky Harris spent decades in and around naval aviation, first as a Navy avionics technician aboard EC-130 TACAMO aircraft, the airborne link between national command authority and the submarine fleet, and later as a civilian instructor at the Navy’s strike fighter weapons school. In July 1981, standing on Vultures Row aboard the USS Eisenhower in the Puerto Rico operating area, he and several other sailors watched something they could not explain hover over one of the carrier’s plane guard ships.
I sit down with Ricky to walk through a lifetime of encounters he kept almost entirely to himself. We cover the object over the Eisenhower in detail: a triangular craft, black and featureless underneath and mirror-bright on top, ringed with colored lights at its corners and a large amber light at its center, holding position over a ship under way before jumping miles across the formation in the blink of an eye and performing a display of movement he says no conventional aircraft could survive. He describes the general-quarters call that followed, a newspaper item he read days later about a ship in the battle group accidentally firing a missile, and why that detail is the part that still unsettles him.
Ricky also recounts a second sighting near Norfolk years later, a vast silent boomerang flying a standard approach profile with an F-117 close in trail, and reflects on why objects keep appearing over carriers and other military assets. He does not claim to know what any of it was. He says only that whatever he saw was not built by any company or country he knew of. Whether these were advanced programs of our own, the craft of an adversary, or something genuinely beyond our science, his account raises the question this show keeps returning to: if credible witnesses across an entire battle group saw the same thing and said nothing, what records still exist, and what would we learn if the people who were there felt free to speak?
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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. The Safe Aerospace Podcast is produced by SafeAero Media.