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

0:00 As I had started walking toward it, it began to descend. Looking at it, and then something possessed me to start walking toward it. And it appeared to be about 50 to 60 ft 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 [music] of light. >> Did it illuminate the ground at all or any the surroundings, do you recall? >> No, it wasn't like it was casting light. Wasn't like beams of light. >> Uh it took about 6 months to be fully certified as a NATO combat pilot. But then once you're certified, then 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 [music] and Christmas. And so on December 26th, that Friday, I was coming back from the base. Of course, I'm driving myself home in my Corvette. So I As I'm driving, I notice in my rearview mirror some really strange-looking lights that are coming in very fast from behind me. And they come up being me, and it just stops

1:02 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 and turned test pilot Dan Isbell. He's had a number of incidences in his life, and we're excited to bring those to you. It 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 safeaerospace.org if you want to learn more about our work and about the reports that we've received. And now, my conversation with

2:04 Dan Isbell. Welcome back to the Safe Aerospace podcast. My name is Ryan Graves. Very excited to sit down here with Dan I'll let him introduce his call sign, but we come from somewhat similar backgrounds and um Dan, you came forward to Americans for Safe Aerospace in May of 2023 to report several instances that you've had. But first, you have an absolutely incredible aviation background. So, we'd love just a quick introduction to yourself and you know, hear a little bit about that before we get into the UAP stuff. So, thanks for joining us, Dan. >> Okay. Well, thanks for inviting me. It's a real pleasure to be here. Great to finally meet you in person. >> I really enjoyed our first interview of our video cast, but uh this is very special. So, thanks for bringing me out. So, I uh I grew up kind of poor and so I didn't have any uh experience with airplanes. None. Never even set foot on an airport. So, I'd never flown.

3:04 Didn't know anything about them and I saw a TV commercial in black and white about 1969, which the Air Force had put on just before the stations go to just total test pattern and there's no programming after that. And it blew me away. It was a F-104 Starfighter taking off I I now know out of Edwards on a test flight. Had a photo chase airplane, which is also a safety chase and they were going up and doing maneuvers with the F-104 in its And they had this incredible orchestral 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 uh they they picked I guess parts of the footage from the photo chase and choreographed it doing these rolls and tumbling around in the clouds and and of course as it gets to the end

4:06 talks about as I tread as I as I was up in the untrespassed 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 it 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 a 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 a full ride 4 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

5:07 in 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 so why did you turn me down? Said well our minimum requirement is 2 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 like for your athletes and stuff? And he said yeah I said I'll be there every night I guarantee I'll make an A in calculus one and if I make an A in calculus one won't I be on at least an equal playing field with everybody else going into calculus two? Maybe a little ahead of the people that didn't make an A in the >> and he said well yeah if you can 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 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."

6:10 I said, "Right now there's only one thing standing between me and my ultimate goal, and it's you." And I looked him 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, you know, made it to where I eventually did. And [clears throat] so, I went to pilot training, but there was about a indefinite uh delay right after graduation. So, I got but then I'm just not activated yet. So, [clears throat] I'm thinking, "What am I going to do?" And the graduate advisor from uh Georgia Tech's aerospace engineering school came and he said, "Listen, [clears throat] we would like to have you working on your master's. And and we'll give you a full ride But you're going to work on a project for NASA to determine how turbine blades are failing in the F-15s.

7:12 And it's a mode three stress failure, meaning it's got both the tension, torsion, and a thermal gradient." "So, we need you to create an apparatus to recreate those um 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 metallurgist so they can figure this out." I said, "Okay, deal." But I said, "The day I get orders to pilot training, I'm leaving even if I haven't finished." >> And he said, "Okay, we'll accept that." And so about 3/4 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 ed delay to finish their degree and then they end up losing their pilot slot and going to AFIT to teach and I didn't want to be one of those." >> Nothing's more important when you you got, you know, you're on that path and losing your slot. I can I can relate to

8:14 >> Did you ever consider the Navy as a >> I did. I applied to both, but I told myself, um, "Whichever one comes in the mail and accepts me first, >> I'll I'll take it." And the Air Force came first and and I accepted it And of course, they were the ones who had the F-104s, so >> Yeah. [laughter] >> But yeah, my dad was in the Navy in World War II for the entirety of the >> So, it was uh 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 pilot since they had given me the So, went off and did pilot training and after that, uh, at the end of the year, we didn't get choices about what we wanted to fly. Just knew I wanted to fly fighters, but we didn't get to like say, "Oh, I want to be an F-16 pilot or an F-15 pilot or an F-4 or whatever." It just came down in a block. And, all of our fighter assignments, except

9:14 for one, were F-111s. >> To the left seat to be aircraft commander. They had never done that Such a complex airplane. They normally had required you have at least one other fighter with at least a thousand 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 it well, I guess it was a trial balloon to see if students out of uh Polytechnic could actually handle the airplane. And some of us made it through and some didn't, but um for me as an aerospace engineer, I kind of relished the opportunity because here's this airplane, the first ever variable swing wing, and the F-111B was the Navy's uh 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, the A model. And uh took the Phoenix missiles. So, it was quite uh quite amazing that they put all that in there in the B model. But, you know, it was a little heavy and

10:15 uh really hard on the tailhook landing on the system. So, the Navy decided against it, but out of that came the second variable swing wing, 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 um in the F-111. Uh my first assignment after I went through the replacement training unit in Mountain Home, uh Idaho, I went to uh the United Kingdom, was stationed at RAF Upper Heyford, and I was there for 4 and 1/2 years. >> That was like your your operational first operational tour? >> And because we had a tactical nuclear it took a while to get all the clearances to um to upgrade to a TS/SCI And of course, we're under personal reliability program, so you know, you got to see the psych if anything's in >> Is that a different personal reliability program than what an average pilot would be on because you were working with

11:17 nuclear capable systems? >> Yeah. Okay. >> Yeah. Everything two-man control and we did alerts sitting with [clears throat] live weapons. That was all uh not released to the public at that time. but of course, the MOD knew um that we were we were defending NATO with those should the should the Cold War break into hot war. So we set alert very uh frequently and because I was the youngest guy and the newbie in the 79th Tactical Fighter Squadron, which was a great squadron that goes all the way back to World War It's currently uh assigned to the Block 50 uh F-16s in uh South Carolina. And uh they're the uh the modern uh go after the uh missile systems. So they put themselves in danger to get lit up and then take them out with harm missiles. that role had been done by F-4Gs before that and then the F the F-16 Block 50

12:19 took that uh program. um because of that I sat on holidays during alert. Other people [clears throat] that had more seniority could be with their families. And one of those holidays that year was Christmas. So I was on the uh the week we go like Friday to Friday. And I that Thursday was December 25th and then uh the day after Christmas was when I changed over to the next crew. And uh and we can get into that in a bit, but that's where I had my first encounter on the way home from that uh Then uh I'd also um as I finished was finishing up my tour there, I'd been selected for an F-16 following assignment, consecutive overseas tour to Torrejon Air Base in Madrid, Spain. I was all excited about that and I flew down there on a European Eagle, which was a C-130 you could just fly around uh NATO and and um the only other guy that actually

13:19 got to go to pilot training out of my graduating uh 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 Great guy. Just a really great guy. And still very involved, obviously. Four-star generals never seem to get to >> But anyway, um 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 call together 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, a grape over arbor over in the driveway.

14:20 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. I gave him a $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 I just applied for the test pilot school to get my name in the hat, but no way I didn't have enough hours or I only had this one airplane experience and normally they require two airplane experience and a lot lot older person than me, but I was just trying to get my foot in the door." So, I get back home and I get a call. And so, the command post is patching me through to a call filed out of Randolph Air Force Base here in Texas. And the guy didn't introduce himself or what's going on. He says, "I understand you have an assignment to F-16s at Torrejon Air Base and that you're going to Luke for training on such and such 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

15:23 And he said, "Have you made any financial commitments that you're unwilling to absorb out of pocket?" >> I said, "Well, I put a $100 deposit on a house down in Spain, and I shipped my Corvette to the States, and it's sitting in a New York Harbor right now." But no, I guess not. Why do you ask? And he said, "Well, this is the Test Pilot School board, and we wanted to know do you want to go on to your F-16 Which was my absolute coveted favorite bird that I wanted to fly. Or do you want to go to Test Pilot 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'm graduate Test Pilot School, and I'm become an F-16 test pilot, which would be even more fun." So, I accepted that change. And so, instead of taking my wife to a beautiful house with a swimming pool and and just

16:23 a lovely setting all around in Madrid, yeah, now I'm we're in taking her out to the desert in the Mojave Desert at Edwards Air Force Base. But she was good sport about it, and then off we went. And that was in the summer of uh 1984. So, I went through the Test Pilot School and uh 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 And then I had uh 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. Where you go out with an airplane you're not trained in, you have no instructor. You just get in and you fly it. >> Got to 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 the airflow, think about all the things that that would be handling quality maybe issues. You read the flight manual.

17:24 You memorize the uh the emergency, you know, code red stuff so that if you've got to have the bold face >> you [clears throat] you have that memorized and then you climb in. So, we got guys that had experienced nothing but like B-52s with five or six-man They're stepping into A-7s but there's never was a second cockpit and going out and flying them with just a guy in a chase airplane. He 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 uh during the school year. >> And so uh we did a lot of exchanging with the Navy's Test Pilot School at 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 when we made >> difficult doing being fixed wing and then going to do a qualitative flight on a helicopter. >> So, but that was what I thought I thought great I want to try that.

18:27 >> So, I put my name in the hat to say to go fly helicopters there. And and I'd already had a chance in qual eval of airplanes they brought to Edwards to fly the S-3 which was you know, one of the ship-based um aircraft carrier-based submarine hunter aircraft. >> I know we both know David Fravor well. I know who he is at least but that was actually his first aircraft. That's an interesting airplane. I didn't fly it off the carrier. I 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 and you're flying the captain's chair, you know, the the left seat. If it's It's you fly in the right seat, so really a 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 or they wouldn't be letting him come try this. >> But I enjoyed >> the same time, you know, you are you know, inducing a lot of risk being in

19:28 that platform for the first time. So, it's actually probably a pretty interesting dynamic. >> Yeah. Yeah. And again like airplanes like the A-7 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 I before I retired, I had um flown 70 different types and models. >> And one of those was the the early F-18, not the Super Hornet, but [clears throat] uh the Marine it was a Marine Corps uh brought it in. They had a two-seater in the Marine pilot sat in the back, I sat in the front and I got to park that thing at 70° angle of attack stably. Now, it was going down, it didn't have the thrust to keep that, but I had never seen 70° angle of attack in any airplane. You could feel the vibrations of the vertical tail. This was before they put the splitter plates on the top of the LEX to kind of move that vortex. It was

20:31 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 for an aircraft of that type and and a cockpit was bigger than the F-16, not quite as big as an F-15, but the F-15 seemed like a cavern and I've flown the A's, the the C's, the even the prototype of the E. Um it was such an exciting time to uh to really experience flight from a guy that had never even touched an airplane before all of this. >> Well, let me let me interrupt real quick. You know, I mean the Super Hornet was very maneuverable as well. You know, when people think of fighters, how fast can it go? How many Gs can it pull? And I'm sure you're probably aware being as fast as possible or pulling most Gs necessarily isn't the best uh best thing you want to That's not the goal in dog fight, right? Being fast isn't always the best. But, the F-18 was unique because it could bleed air speed so fast. >> Uh extremely maneuverable. I mean, one of the I enjoyed doing it more than

21:33 almost anything. It's just just like you said, going vertical on the cans as slow as I can. Basically, I I get it down to 80 knots >> and just hang out there and then, you 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 um what we call two circle where you're trying to rate around on the person to one circle where it's who can go the slowest, right? And get behind. The F-18 was was phenomenal at doing that. Um and then you combine that with a high off bore sight missile and there wasn't too many people we couldn't take out. It's fascinating airplane. I was uh I was working in the Pentagon in uh program analysis and evaluation and they had never hired a test pilot for that job before, but they they recruited me right out of uh 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 operations research systems analyst

22:33 uh degree, which is what's normally sitting in that seat. And they brought me into an office in uh uh man, I got to sit in Boyd's uh seat. >> His desk. Uh he was there. Yeah. >> Not just the position, but his physical >> desk. His office, his desk. That That became my office. And we didn't have a Navy rep uh when I first got there. So, I you know, they they made me wear civilian coat and tie every day. I didn't wear my uniform at all ever in the Pentagon cuz I'm said you're not working for the Air Force now, you're working for the Secretary of So, I quickly had to go out and buy a wardrobe cuz I didn't really have those kind of clothes. >> And then uh 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

23:34 stuff for TacAir, tactical aviation. So, we had the F/A-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 you know, all of a sudden I'm down to the Navy >> regime or is this Yeah, I remember learning about that. Yeah. >> And uh you know, of course OSD is really worried. I wonder, you know, are they 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 of the F-22. We do not understand what we're getting into with this And so, he had me explaining things about the F-22. And so, I was really hawking that for the OSD and the Air Force. I ended up doing a very technical thing for the Secretary of Acquisition cuz the Air Force kind of

24:36 refused to do the kind of study they wanted, but they wanted an the one-on-one and then you know, higher level and then a full war engagement putting the F in comparison to the 2S slept, you know, service life extension F-15 with a little bit of treatment for reducing some of its signature and uh what was the joint strike fighter at the time which later became, you know, the And so, we also had to include in the war game, you know, things like the B-2. I had so many USAP clearances to be able to do that and uh went out to some of our FFRDCs and also got permission to get Lockheed Skunk Works 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 they allowed me to do that. And anyway, the the final analysis was pretty convincing that no, the F-22 is definitely

25:38 worth keeping because of all the things it's going to be able to do that none of the other airplanes could do. So, it kind of saved the program at the time and uh but I got a lot of appreciation from some very high-up people on the uh on the Defense Department for finally giving them a real no-kidding >> big deal study that they were looking what what year was this? >> That would have been in uh Let's see, I was in the Pentagon from '98 through 2001. So, probably around the year 2000 or nine maybe '99. >> That's when they they wanted that study done and I I delivered. >> You know, the 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 if you know, if you can if you can share uh what were the the

26:40 characteristics that you identified that made it an acceptable next generation fighter cuz 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 in contrast a joint strike fighter type aircraft 35 which is almost this situational awareness drinker, right? It 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 were what what was your assessment of the F-22 why it would be so valuable? >> Well, I had been at Edwards as a test pilot school instructor during the time that the fly-off happened between the and the YF-22. So, these are the test models of the what ultimately came the F-22 and the F-35, correct? >> No, no. For the YF-23 was a competitor to the F-22. Really gangly looking airplane with very canted uh out that were both horizontal and vertical tails.

27:40 was actually a faster airplane than the And actually a little stealthier. But, Lockheed did some things in their program secretly. Not unannounced, but uh they they decided that during the test program there and though it wasn't a requirement that they would actually fire an AIM-9X out of the side bay and fire an AMRAAM out of the main bay and show uh the the aircraft's capabilities like And of course the F-22 was the only one that had thrust vectoring nozzles. And they're not 3D, they're 2D cuz they're very stealthy from the rear as well. And they could cant 22° plus and minus. And that gave tremendous maneuverability. And of course, I know you've seen one at an air show before and what they can do. >> Yeah, did you? >> Um I've I've fought one in at risk of taking us slightly off track, firing an AIM-9X is one thing, but allowing allowing the ability to utilize

28:41 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. >> Um and so when I would fight them and we're you know, we're fighting rag students the the guys going through the rag so they weren't that great. Um but I mean we would take six or seven or eight 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 fight's over and it's like okay, you won. Congratulations. Uh but well, I don't want to get into too much details. I'll just say that the secret limitations were a real concern for the >> their ability to operate. >> been in fact in the the upgrade program, the very expensive upgrade program where they're 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. >> Uh it has a lot of very special metals in it to streamline and not have

29:42 anything coming in 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 then of course it was integrated for complete everywhere with the DAS system in the >> And I developed a lot of the capabilities on that uh binocular system for the F-35 using F-16 simulators, uh the dome simulators at uh Fort Worth. It was quite interesting what you could do with that. They looked at doing it in the F-16 but we didn't have enough core processing power. In fact, the F the JSF didn't in the way it was originally planned but time caught up and Moore's Law's caught up and next thing you know, you could actually do 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 DAS system is truly amazing and they're they're even upgrading the F-35s with a

30:42 something that's like four times as high >> what DAS stands for, but uh do you do you recall? >> But it's basically distributed >> It's a distributed aperture system. >> aperture system. That's what it is. So basically around the the craft itself, sensors, infrared sensors I understand, perhaps it's something else as well, allow you to detect missile launches, you know, behind you, uh all sorts of stuff and that gets pumped into to the helmet. >> it's a it's like a basketball around >> Uh you can see up, down, back, forward. 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 uh people, the heat [clears throat] signature of people, uh 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. >> That's super helpful. I mean, that's >> Even the F-18, we had the JHMCS system, joint helmet mounted queuing system, and nowhere near the amount of capabilities, but even just being able to look and

31:43 designate a point on the ground, never mind a moving target, was super Well, the F-22, even though it has dog fighting capabilities, which are which were pretty good, it was really optimized for BVR. And the radar that was put in it was the most powerful AESA, active electronically scanned array, that it 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 a deficit that they're going to try to make up for, but the time that they made the requirement for that in the it was all about defeating the Soviet Union's latest uh you know, SU-27 and follow-ons to that. >> And uh 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

32:43 >> And not only not only range, but you know, I it's moving away from active systems as well. Anything that you're emitting from a craft is now a a homing signal more or less for an enemy capability. And even F-18 is getting um Oh gosh, what are they called? But they're getting um Oh, it's slipping my mind. They they forward-looking It's not a flare pod, obviously, but it's a it's a targeting system, an infrared targeting system, a passive targeting system. Uh I I got some buddies who've 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 uh 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

33:44 target is. And of course, that can all be fed into your AIM-9X. But it's optimized to go really high and not as fast as like our predecessor aircraft like the F-111 was a Mach 2.5 and the F model it had the uh much more powerful engines in it. Could probably go Mach 3, but it'd take all the paint off the airplane. Been done a few times. But the F-14, you know, was 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, uh is still pretty fast. If you can get up to Mach 2 and you can be up around 55,000 ft, 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 why >> to have much bigger missile, expensive missile. Although, of course, we're working on those as >> Yeah, we're working on those and and they'll they're designed to be able to

34:45 fit in both the F-35 and the F-22's weapon space. But, I you know, the the fighter pilots kind of learned the lesson from the F-4 when they didn't put a gun in it cuz they thought missiles 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, cuz the technology had improved so much, I man, that's a lot of weight and uh 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, dog fight. But, I think their thinking was we want the hedge on the bet regardless. >> But, that's certainly not where it's designed to operate. When it operates in BVR mode nobody ever sees it. >> Beyond visual range, just >> Yeah, beyond visual range. Yeah. Thank And then the WVR, within visual range, where you

35:46 do your dog fighting, it's not optimized for that, though it's that thrust vectoring helps it do some really cranky >> Uh but, yeah, like you said, even with the Hornet, Super Hornet, you could you could do some pretty amazing stuff because of the controllability of those canted 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 straight into the Super >> trying to think. No, I I I I went right to the Super Hornet. Um in the rag in the in the fleet replacement squadron where you train on on your fleet aircraft, um they have the Charlie models, you know, Alpha through Yeah. Uh Delta uh and then the E and F's and I was trying to remember did I fly in any of the the the the regular old hornets, but no, just um just a super hornet. >> Well, certainly they're they have the F-18 designation, but they are very different airplanes as you know, it's much bigger. And in fact, the YF-17 which was a competitor to the YF-16 back

36:48 in the lightweight fighter flyoff 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 legs is much larger. You have bigger wing, more fuel. >> I think it's overall about 33% larger. >> Yeah, it's it's impressively bigger. But my gosh, what a good airplane that it's been for the Navy. It's such a not just a dog fighter 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 uh it's it was really a pleasure having the career I did. It was like a dream come true. Uh I feel very lucky, blessed even cuz I

37:48 I you know, I was I have a strong belief in God and um I know God saved my life a few times when I shouldn't have 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 raft target out there on a on a range where we could you know, do the BDU-33 practice bombs on a little raft raft out there. And you had to acquire by by the ground mapping radar in the turn and 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 6 degrees bank until I get the target locked on at

38:49 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 1,000 ft. Don't go above 6 degrees bank. Do not look outside. Look directly on the instrument. Fly this an instrument turn." So I get down in the radar, which I'm not, you know, I wasn't a wizard ever, I'm working all the manual knobs and 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 and about 40 degrees nose low and we're well below 1,000 ft now and we're scorching toward the ocean. And he's looking over the center beam, you know, where the gull wing canopy is 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

39:50 we're cooking in full afterburner and I've got the stick all the way back. We went to 7.3 Gs, 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 50 ft very fast and I just knew we didn't have 50 ft. 5 0 ft. [laughter] Yep, the nose is pointed up, but I'm 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 captain out of the aircraft. There was no time. >> So I just closed my eyes at that point and thought, "Okay, >> We're going to die. >> here here comes the explosion, you know, we're going to get vaporized." And then I counted potatoes. And about five or six 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 and we're climbing up through, you know, several thousand feet

40:50 at 60° nose up at that point in full And it shook me to my core cuz, you 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 cuz I was scanning up there at the space, you know, not not on the ocean. But yeah, I was uh 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 though. 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

41:52 it hadn't been for a lot of intervention, I think, from the higher And uh 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 But I get stem cells for that. I have to pay for my out of pocket, but I go to Panama and get uh 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 how good do 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 transform mitochondria and get your cells working and do all this healing. It's not permanent cuz the things that are inorganic can't be removed without me trading lungs, you know, have a lung transplant. And I'm not been willing to do that. >> You know, it might be Sorry to interrupt. It might be worth talking about that story cuz that I mean, that was quite fascinating as well.

42:53 I have a I have some comments I want to make on it just based off of my experience in the jet, but um would you mind sharing what happened there? >> Oh, sure. Yeah, so I'm I'm at Eglin Air Force Base, and I'm getting ready to take off for a test mission in an F-16. It's single seat, ready to go. Everything's on time. Crew chief pulls the chocks. I start out. I make a right turn. Then I make a left turn onto the parallel taxiway heading down to the And a few feet after I made that left-hand turn, just taxiing the airplane along in idle, suddenly there's this massive explosion sound. Okay, and it concussed me 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, stopped the aircraft, stopcocked 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. Then it's enveloping the airplane from the wheel well forward, and it's spreading.

43:57 I go to raise the canopy to to get out manually cuz I could get out on the other side then there wasn't flame there yet. And the canopy jammed and just stopped. And the 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 in the right wheel well that exploded. And it severed a bunch of lines in there and that's what was leaking down and creating the accelerant for the fire. It was an electrical fire at first. But I had no electrical power now, and especially after I've 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. It took 273 turns to get it all the way up. [snorts] And I got about five or six 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's about that far up off the rail. And when the canopy's jettisoned, the rocket motors are in the front, but they kind of depend on the plate that it's against to help accelerate it up cuz you get that blast feedback.

44:59 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. >> Yeah, and well, there's no canopy bow in the F-16, right? So, you know, when you first told the story to me, I was thinking in my head is 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? In our system, they break through the >> 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 no way 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 cuz well, often times you come down in the in the fire. >> So much yeah, can go wrong there. >> And and plus, you know, it probably would have hurt my back enough not to be able to fly anymore, who knows what.

46:00 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 handle and put this special bit that goes into the outside for emergency egress and he comes sprinting like he's trying to win the 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 cuz it's quite a bit over the ground you know when the airplane's sitting up And he managed to get his left hand between the canopy and the rail. >> That's probably what 10 ft? I mean >> no joke. It's not like getting to the roof of a car. >> 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, jam it into the emergency egress 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

47:00 >> He doesn't know if the jet's going to blow up while he's doing that, you know. >> He doesn't know. He put himself in harm's way. But as I see he's being successful and the crank the canopy the what he was doing it was coming up faster than it ever came up on its electric motor. So I quickly safe the seat unstrapped 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 onto the rail, you have to wait cuz your feet will go up under that and you don't want to let go then cuz 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 cuz he's got nothing left. He's burned up. He couldn't even He couldn't even get up on his own. >> saved me and then I had to save him, and we got we got away from the aircraft.

48:01 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 And when we when we got up there a little ways away from 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. >> Yeah. I mean, to think of what he did that day and the human courage it took, that the but what he did save 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 cuz otherwise, you know, you got this flame hazard cuz oxygen will really accelerate a fire if it gets in the So, I turned off my oxygen breathing what's coming in through the canopy. Of course, my EPU, which runs on hydrazine, which is a very deadly thing, and it's

49:01 got a very high percentage of ammonia in its exhaust, which is very bad for your Well, that has come in cuz there's a right quartering tailwind is bringing it right in the cockpit cuz it's open just So, I got that. I got all this other burning soot stuff coming in, and I breathed that in. fiberglass and >> 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. I was okay for a while, but it though slowly started making my lungs uh worse and worse. So, the first thing that showed up with 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 they nodes in my lungs when they thought it was lymphoma, which is a cancer.

50:03 They ruled out lymphoma, but they didn't have a second diagnosis. So, he 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 9/11 that went into the burning rubble, they developed this for all the same reasons. And many of them died and they found it in autopsy. lived for a while and were being treated, but died anyway. And then some are living with it as I have been. So, [clears throat] 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. Uh later I was so I was the F-22 program And then I was uh reassigned to the lab to do directed energy weapons. I was working for the Secretary of the Air Force for an uh one-dash-one priority national team. I was leading a national team.

51:03 And I had enough endurance to get through all of 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. So, you're either going to going to have an MEB and you'll be out immediately, but we know you're working for the Secretary of the Air Force right now in a special 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 MEB process." And I said, "That's a good choice." So, I did I turned down uh 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 to develop the ones we got now, even worked with the Navy on the ship based >> And uh of course they've been employed now and the Iran in the Gulf out there. >> That's really good cuz 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.

52:04 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 test bed. And they were thinking you know the Air Force buy like 20 or 30 of these and I 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 we're going to land and refuel them with these People can die just dealing with the If the chemical start leaking in the airplane everybody on board's going to die. If the airplane crashes anybody within a 5-mi radius is going to die. So I said I just I think okay great. It will have a over a megawatt of laser energy on a on an ICBM 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 don't see a fleet of these ever. >> And in fact they didn't after it had a

53:05 successful test program I think under he ordered the airplane to go to the boneyard and then because Putin wanted to cut up in little pieces they sawed it up in little pieces. >> So they just destroyed everything there so it couldn't be ever put back >> So what's the alternative to chemical? >> Fiber laser. >> A fiber? Yeah. >> Fiber laser. >> From what I understand it's a capacitor >> Fiber lasers have you know like fiber optics there's cladding on the inside outer perimeter on the inside that lets light channel through and it curves. >> A fiber laser has an inner cladding as well a core that reacts and produces the the laser energy. In In fact, >> all the atoms start getting coherent in the fiber. You coil up the fiber. And anyway, the everybody laughed at me. The 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

54:06 maximum theoretical for a fiber laser that was just not useful. 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. 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 Skunk Works. And he worked on the F-117 stealth fighter for Lockheed Skunk Works. And one of the problems with the stealth fighter had been it had a rake up front. You've probably seen the front of it. They're those four pitot tubes. Uh P total for uh measuring air data, which was critical cuz the aircraft needed a lot of feedback control cuz it was a hopeless diamond shape. Not a good aerodynamic airplane, but uh

55:08 but they used a derivative of the F-16 fly-by-wire 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 could determine air speed without the need for those." >> And they gave him an L-1011 Lockheed L-1011 to instrument up and go try it. And he used a gas laser, a CO2 laser, just for trying to look at principles to see if they worked. In fact, it did work. It worked extremely accurate But then, you know, there was no way to fit all that into um to an F-117. But he left Lockheed, started his own company called Optical Air Data Systems. And when [clears throat] I found him, I came with a proposition

56:08 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, and in about 6 to 8 months, he came up with three loops, one feeds the next, feeds the next. And after those 6 months of trials in the lab, we were able to exceed the theoretical maximum for a single fiber by over 10 Oh, excuse me, a 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 And then that started the Air Force guys 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 can probably generate it all. If it's in a vehicle like a tank or a tracked vehicle or something, they've

57:10 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 I working with the Navy on you know, they were trying to get to a 500 kW And um it was going to be a coherently You know how uh just to explain this for a little bit, if you want to phase all those different fiber bundles, you remember how I don't know, you're old enough to remember the days when radios drifted off station, constantly having to bring them back. >> I'm not. >> That was solved with a circuitry called feedback loop. And they were able to stabilize so that you could, you know, digitally go to a radio station and it never drifted off. And you can apply those same principles

58:11 to controlling the phasing of the light. And um that was something I thought about a lot early on, and finally it was MIT's Lincoln Lab that started super like putting some effort in it. I funded a project to see if we could do it with six or seven 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 beam quality you can get. But we can incoherently combine them through um multi-layer multi-layer 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 So the spectral beam combining, which is what that's called, is uh 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 they're kind of playing

59:12 around with both of those. The Navy's looking at both those capabilities. The ones that are out in the field now on are all um spectral beam combined lasers, but they're still working with MIT Lincoln Labs to come up with an even greater power 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 that they're firing at the Navy and you spend a two or three million dollar 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 drone >> Yeah, unlimited ammunition essentially, >> Um is that so important? Where you know, maybe just to put a 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 um the power of the systems, the size of

1:00:13 the systems, are we on a a trend where these are going to continue to get >> smaller and more powerful or do you think we're hitting a wall? >> What's nice when you get big industry involved and they start working with subcontractors for the various they started going after overall efficiency of the laser. Now, lasers were at 5% wall plug efficiency from wall plug to laser power output. We got it to 15% with those early fiber laser things, which was groundbreaking. >> But uh the last I checked, it's at 49% >> Oh, wow. >> You still got a lot of waste heat you got to deal something with, but the beauty of the Navy is they got seawater they can circulate through these as a heat absorber, so >> Uh yeah, I'm really excited about the Navy solution. To put it on an airplane is still challenging, but we're getting closer. Maybe the F-47 will have it, I don't know cuz I'm not read into that >> keep um y'alls your rumors about that being a technology that goes out even, you know, perhaps not not to be shooting, you

1:01:14 be at 40,000 ft and to to shoot down or to shoot a building on the ground or an aircraft 100 miles away, but even as like a close-in defense system from other missiles would >> that's our goal right now is this a defensive capability which would avoid um depending solely on electronic warfare means. And because they they also kind of give you away. And if you're particularly in stealth airplane. So, I don't know where that's going to go, but it's come a long way from to 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 beam quality. And the breakthroughs have been amazing. So, it was tough teaching it cuz I kept having to update courses literally a few months away I'd have to go and update all my PowerPoint to give the greatest and latest on the students, but the first course I developed for them

1:02:14 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 whole life. And they're used to showing equations and proving 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, um engineering and math, they don't have And a lot of the fighter pilots don't have that and don't need it to be a fighter pilot. So, they finally realized cuz it just went over their heads because guys get up and walk out of the room, so it wouldn't affect it. 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 help 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

1:03:15 And it was filled with a lot of naval because they you know they're going to school there and they're kind of captive audience. But we had army guys, we had air force people, we had a lot of uniform people in that group in the big stadium town auditorium style 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 INDOPACOM and we had a shorter course that's better like a 30 minute but it would usually expand cuz the generals have a lot of questions. So when we're briefing the GOs we try to compress it. The course we did for the war fighters was a 4-hour course cuz that's about all you could absorb. And we have breaks in there of course but really enjoyed doing that and um um I'm I'm really thankful. I mean my career is kind of weird because it it took so many different turns.

1:04:16 >> Well, I'm jealous in a lot of way. 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 envision myself going if I had been able to succeed in getting in the test pilot school. I didn't necessarily fail but I was injured during my application window. So I was >> uh medically uh I was medically down and I need to be in a flight status to apply in the Navy and so I kind of missed my Uh which was a bummer but >> made a good one man cuz I've seen how your brain works and you'd have been a great test pilot. >> I think so. I think so but um found another calling you could say. >> Um I think we've established you have some aviation experience um some technical know-how. Let's kind of switch gears here into into the UAP world a little bit. Um 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 I know. Maybe you can kind of give us some insight to without necessarily going into them yet, just kind of like how you decided to

1:05:17 start speaking about this. >> Yeah, well, I I certainly held my first uh 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 of 1980. when you're in personnel reliability 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, "Hey, mark him crazy and he's out." So, it it could have threatened my entire flying career, especially the stigma was so bad back then. So, I didn't tell a >> It's kind of thing though that you you don't forget. It's just too uh I don't know. It's a big ontological

1:06:18 kind of shock. I mean, we had to memorize cuz this was during the the Cold War. We had to memorize every silhouette of every kind of rotorcraft and jet fighter, 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 uh 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 know, 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 on the president's order you mind if we release this story we can leave your name out. I said yeah you can you can release it all it's been a gradual transition but

1:07:21 I think it's a very important topic. It's one that maybe not everybody still believes in and I know not everybody's 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's it doing that? How does it perform what it's doing? Cuz it's certainly beyond any physics that we currently have that's acknowledged not that maybe somebody 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 end of July 2023 and only months after that organization was formed.

1:08:21 Well thank so thank you for coming forward for one and like you said I agree I think you know many pilots don't feel comfortable talking about this even What kind of triggered you to come forward though? You know I mean was there something you had saw on the news or did you just feel like hey I'm out of it now and I'm hearing about it maybe it's time. I started to see sort of a momentum Uh I think that as people started coming that had been on the inside and particularly seeing David Grusch come forward. What a bright soul he is and of course he interviewed with you on that the 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 in flight like some of your I guess fellow aviators did uh doing training out out over the Atlantic.

1:09:21 David Fravor's story uh really catalyzed a lot for me. It was he and you going in front of Congress that I think 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? Um What am I What am I holding back for now? It's It's It's years of thinking nobody could ever know. No, 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 pay me to do this. >> When you're in a job like that and you feel like it's an important job for the there's this service, there's this camaraderie, there's this whole, as you particularly as fighter pilots, there's this thing where your your lives are

1:10:22 dependent on each other. And so, your teammates in your formation, your your teammates in whatever squadron or unit you're in, you form a bond that's like nothing else cuz 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 hazardous cuz there's unknown unknowns and, you never know if you're going to encounter one. You go after the known unknowns, but there's unknown unknowns cuz it's a very non-linear environment in the atmosphere and in supersonic and stuff. And people die. And I was willing to take that risk and and advance on, but uh 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 >> Yeah, so I was um

1:11:23 I was the youngest guy to go to F-111s at uh 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, time in the right seat as a Pizzo. You needed at least two airplanes. You needed like 1,500 hours flying time. I didn't have any of that. And they decided cuz they were so short of aircraft commanders to fly in the left seat and then pilot the thing that 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-38B which had a HUD and you could release some BDUs, small 25-lb practice bombs that weren't explosive. >> And because I had done well in that, they came to me and they said we think it'd be better to put you in an F-15 cuz I did I did win Top Gun of my class. And

1:12:24 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 could get me into training. >> And here I had this opportunity to go to an airplane that 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 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-111 assignment. And never looked back and thought that was a wrong decision. Really enjoyed flying 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 a an air-to-air radar what the crap. We could barely track our flight lead and weather. So, it wasn't an air-to-air design machine the way the B model would have But for air-to-ground and the ground mapping and the terrain following radar system was the first of its kind. It was a beast. You could go super fast.

1:13:24 You could go supersonic. Uh You could exceed Mach 1.2, you know, at treetop heights. And it had 34,000 lb of internal JPA. So, it was really amazingly long-legged airplane and fun to fly. So, I'm doing my first year. It took about 6 months to be fully certified as a NATO combat pilot. And of course, you're flying in the ICAO, the International Civil Air Organization. Little bit different rules from the FAA. So, you had to really get all of that down. But then once you're certified, then you're also then sitting full alert. And our alert was called Victor alert. And we sat with B61 thermonuclear weapons loaded in the bomb bays and on the 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. >> That any any time we could be scrambled.

1:14:26 Fortunately, that never happened. But because I was the young guy, the youngest guy in the squadron, the uh I got the privilege of sitting on alerts that took up holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. So, I did I done Thanksgiving. And now it's Christmas time. So, I did the Christmas tour. I didn't I didn't ever say no. It's like okay, got to pay my >> 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 a some of my squadron mates at the Jandi's bar on base, talk to them for a little bit. Of course, I'm driving myself home my Corvette, so don't want to get a DUI and that would also take me out of the So, I might have had half a beer if I had anything, but I just basically we were singing some fighter pilot songs and just being glad to be out of there and and going home. So, around 10:00 is when we're encounter came. And it was I lived

1:15:28 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 we 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. So, but anyway, I knew what was on the other side of this tree line, it's a golf course. And I'm all alone. There's nobody coming at me. There's nobody behind me. Um 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, as I'm driving, I notice in my rearview mirror some really strange looking lights that are coming in very fast from behind me.

1:16:28 And they come and beam me and it just stops instantly. It just 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 There's some trees that kind of like guard trees that most golf courses have, so if you hit a ball weird, it doesn't hopefully get all the way through to the >> But this thing was hovering just above those trees and over the golf course. It was making no sound whatsoever. First, I just sat in the car and just looked at it through the windows, rolled 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. >> sounds at all? >> No, there was just silence. Just silence, which was kind of weird. I stood out behind my Corvette looking at it. And then something possessed me to start walking toward it.

1:17:30 At this point, when I got to the closest I got, I would say it's about 150 ft. And it appeared to be about 50 to 60 ft 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 >> The lights? >> Was it like a field? Or was it like fixed lights that were blinking in and out kind of? >> No, it was more like a field. What it What it reminded me was plasma or like, you know, where you have the aurora borealis or the aurora australis 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

1:18:30 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, I 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 anybody 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." Whereas we would now call it a an unidentified anomalous phenomenon. But in the day, the vernacular would have been UFO, and I knew it was death on 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 cuz if that is some sort of ionization of the air through some sort of plasma,

1:19:31 might not be so safe to get within close range of it." So, for 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 um yeah, I decided it was time to at least tell you. I didn't have another sighting of any kind until about 10 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 >> When when that when those lights you saw in your rearview mirror approached, did and then 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 they were almost like some headlights, if you will, that were on front of that craft?

1:20:32 >> Yeah, well, you >> know, looking in your rearview mirror and the back glass through the 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 cuz it 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. >> Do you remember the color of it? The craft itself? >> It was just far 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 >> 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 a direct front angle. I know there was there was a guy who went on the Earthfiles show that I saw sometime later as all this started develop. That was Linda Moulton Howe show show about UFO things. And he was stationed RAF Upper Heyford. And he was telling of an encounter right

1:21:33 over the weapon storage area while he was guarding some weapons. And he got to see it front on at eye level cuz he was on a little bit of a knoll. And as he's walking as century, he had a rifle sling rifle on his shoulder. He's guarding some weapons before they were going to put them lock them in the storage area. So, he's waiting on the weapons people to come and take the weapons and he's just guarding And he's going back and forth. It was a peaceful night, no problem. And one time he turns to go back the other way and there's this thing just sitting there 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 And he had a pretty pretty accurate description of it and I was I was amazed because I had never heard that there was he wasn't the only one at RAF Upper Heyford that saw it.

1:22:33 And so there've been a number of people that come come uh and admit that, but he was using an alias name and an altered voice. And at the end of that show, Linda Moulton Howe said if anybody else has seen uh had an encounter in this time frame, please contact me on um ProtonMail. I didn't have an account like that before, but I established one. And I sent her a a ProtonMail about it. >> And uh 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 4-hour courses that Monday. And that Monday evening, when I'm back in my hotel room, the phone rings and it's Linda Moulton Howe. >> And we had about a 2-hour discussion and she wanted me to come on Earthfiles and

1:23:35 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 cuz 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 cuz this is important work." And she she accepted that and never never outed me. But yeah, I I had told her about it because of her show and she kind of logged in her show that RAF Upper Heyford, which is a little north of Heyford, had had sightings that very night, too. And a similar in description in all of them. So and there was one other base, I don't remember the one might have been RAF Croughton. But there were several bases in the vicinity and so this is more on the west Um like RAF Upper Heyford is 12 mi north of Oxford, England. Whereas, the Rendlesham 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.

1:24:38 But with Linda Moulton Howe, she was kind of putting it together. This was a bigger deal than just the Rendlesham Forest and Bentwaters Woodbridge bases. And of course, they were the That's the largest nuclear storage in all of NATO was there at Bentwaters Woodbridge. And they were over the weapon storage area just like it ended up on the on the ones. So, the guy at Upper Heyford said, you know, when the weapons guys got that the first guy got there, he looks up and he goes, "That's not one of ours." He got in the truck and just left the guy out there alone. >> 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 them pretty low when they came out of the bunkers to put the weapons away. And then it It never moved really fast. It just noiselessly moved away. But he saw it from underneath and he saw it from front almost directly I'm on level with it because of the berm he was So, it was an interesting uh account and

1:25:39 after having my account, I never talked to that guy and we never heard a word about there being an encounter on the Um, so yeah, that that really intrigued my mind that this this thing that we knew as Rendlesham Forest incident >> A much bigger event perhaps. >> event. Um And why and the timing, who knows. >> Do you recall the color of the light underneath the craft? >> Yeah, it was um There It was never like a solid color, but it was like these floating between uh more purplish lights and sometimes a more reddish light and yellowish. Occasional a greenish hue. It was a 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, it you know, because it had no visible means of propelling itself. I mean, I've certainly seen a lot of uh AVAB, and even the F-35B

1:26:42 do their hovering at the air show, and that's quite loud. >> That's right. That's what I was thinking. Yeah, you you you could tell how that thing is working just by listening to it. >> And even a helicopter is very loud when the rotors are going, and there was no rotors, there was no rotor noise, it was just silence. That's what was so stumping 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'm certainly aware that the electromagnetic force is 10 to the 39th power greater than gravity. >> So, in my technical mind, electromagnetic something >> uh 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. Um and and then have it be able to propel you by completely unknown to us, at least technically at that point.

1:27:45 >> And I thought a lot, could that have been one of our craft that we reverse >> But then why would it be doing that, particularly, you know, appearing over bases and weapon 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. >> over golf courses in different >> 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, um, you know, people are still seeing things of similar shapes, right? Uh, black triangles, of Uh, and even, I think it was 2022 or um, a pilot had a near midair with one of these black triangles, uh, as he was leaving Johannesburg, South Africa. he was climbing through, uh, about 29,000 ft, getting ready to level off,

1:28:47 sees the black triangle off his nose. Basically, he looks to his co-pilot, looks at his sensors, it comes back and the thing's right there. They have a 100-ft pass. >> That's close. >> Yes. I mean, especially in a 737-style aircraft, where the vertical, you know, the stabilators, you know, what was that, 40 ft? I don't know exact number, but, you know, there's not a lot of room for margin. He actually braced as he thought it was going to hit their tail. >> Oh my god. >> Uh, fully loaded passenger jet, and, um, 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. and others have described similarly. Uh, his co-pilot saw it as well, of course, and, um, 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. Um, that's why I asked the question about the color. >> Yeah, unfortunately, I did not see color cuz it was just such a dark night. There were no lights out there on the golf course, and my headlights were >> the field, if you will. Yeah, like the colors that you described

1:29:48 in that field, he basically described the same type of field-like dynamics, but it was more yellowish. >> Yeah, and I would think that if it was plasma-generated, it would depend a lot what's in the atmosphere, what >> what it's reacting to, you know, what it's creating, to luminesce 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 uh, exciting, exciting. Yeah. >> What um, 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. It's not like it was probably interested in playing around a 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 sighting at Upper Heyford was an hour and I don't know, it's like 1:15 in the

1:30:49 morning. So, that's 3 hours 15 minutes after my sighting. So, his sighting was on the early hours of the 27th, so it's after midnight. Mine was on the late evening of the 26th at 10:00 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 Cuz you know, I was a red Corvette wasn't common on the roads of England. It >> They liked your car, huh? >> Maybe it would just saw it as an unusual vehicle cuz as you know, it's so streamline looking, sloped back and >> Maybe because you're so isolated, it perceived you as an opportunity of >> for what it Do you feel like you got out of your car purely for curiosity >> Oh, absolutely. I mean, it was My mind's immediately just trying to figure it out. What is this? It didn't It wasn't anything uh, from the Soviet >> It wasn't anything from NATO. It wasn't any kind of flying vehicle that I was familiar with at all.

1:31:49 And it didn't It wasn't like a helicopter at all, either. >> Just to kind of put it into the the listeners or viewers perspective, you know, as you're as you're this close to it and you're looking up, like how how much space did it take up in your field of view, you know? Would it be like holding a skateboard in your hand >> felt that maybe from my field of view. And I don't know exactly where it was. Um, I didn't know it was beyond that first level of trees and there's probably some other trees on the other >> I don't know the exact hole it was over cuz it was probably it was either a fairway or a hole. I'd only played that golf course once. >> Are you aware of the Air Force putting uh bunkers or weapon storage under golf courses? Wouldn't surprise me. >> Not aware of that. >> There's a There is a golf course on the Navy likes to joke that they're, you know, the Air Force is very proud of their golf courses and they have one in every base uh no matter where you go. So, maybe they're doing it on purpose, you know, it's a convenient excuse to dig up a lot of land and rework it perhaps to put something there.

1:32:50 >> Interesting theory. >> Interesting, yeah. Um, hm. Did it illuminate the ground at all or any of the surroundings do you recall? >> No, it wasn't like it was casting light. >> Wasn't like beams of light. >> It was just these changing >> 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 all I could see was the outline it made because of the colors going around the >> 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 >> And of course my hearing was really good at that point cuz I'm just starting my fighter pilot career. Not so good now, yeah, that was that was very distinct to

1:33:53 >> And I think just just the overall 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 um I mean not your actions, but just generally shameful that we as a species as 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. uh 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 cuz I was on some unacknowledged uh SAP programs that um the USAPs, the unacknowledged special access programs that are bigoted and

1:34:54 and you have to very few people read in. But and when you're out there, they they put on these goggles and stuff on you and you can only see how to walk straight ahead and they're out there guarding you with rifles and >> you know, you're not allowed to see anything that's not part of what you're there for and cleared to. Super super secret place, a very interesting place, yeah, um it's weird that I had and that was during my F-16 program thing and we were developing the for the Block 50. And some of that was being developed out And it was not common knowledge the capabilities that our plane was going to have. But we also had some special weapons that were being developed. So later as uh commander at Hill Air Force Base, my unit had a C-130 that would regularly take supplies out there to them from other countries for various purposes and I flown to those guys. But uh we had

1:35:54 we had a skiff that was tracking one of the very advanced cruise missile programs that was in development at that time. And that was all being done out yeah, like I've had back and forth on they even offered me a job at one point. Um and so I went and did all the lie detector 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 then 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 for. I always liked learning, so I didn't mind taking a year off flying and going to school. >> Sounds like an ideal career to me. >> Well, it was it was one that I think with your brain and the way you think is so so much like mine. Yeah, I was 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 cuz I invented a lot of

1:36:55 stuff that helped flying. I did the first ever computerized flight program for for planning flight planning. And it took us a good 4 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 uh what was a basic language and the only language I'd had familiarity with was it in grad school uh that was not basic. It was What was the >> Fortran, yeah, yeah. >> And uh this was nothing like that, but we didn't have to do punch cards to program this little mini computer. And I worked like for around the clock 4 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 my squadron commander if I could bring it in and of course the old guys didn't want anything to do with it cuz you know >> gimmicky thing. >> especially back then. It's not like you

1:37:56 used to integrating with new tech >> Yeah. Some of the young whippersnappers that had just come out of uh you know, their training and and they are new to the jet. They were curious about it cuz 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 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 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 a dedicated book on Chebyshev polynomials and >> Chebyshev polynomials. >> the right polynomials to do the math to make it come out. And then I would test fly it 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 great

1:38:58 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, I put my my squadron commander let me put it in the squadron and then they started using it. And then I couldn't get my computer back so eventually the other squadrons wanted one too so I talked to him and went up to the wing commander and said if you'll give me a permission with a 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 cuz we used to get frag I don't know what they call it in the navy but it was fragmentary order of So headquarters of US 7th Fleet would send out this thing by teletype and the only teletype machine was in the command And then they would rip off sections of it and hand it to a 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

1:39:59 under attack?" 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 over 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 So, I decided they had just come out with this new thing called a a modem, where you could do acoustic coupler with a phone. So, I went to the wing commander and said, "If you don't mind, I'd I'd like to get your contracting folks to allow me to buy some things off the economy cuz I need to 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

1:41:00 lines and then undigitize it on the other end or take it out 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 a 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 appear to be extremely advanced craft that you're not familiar with. I I interrupted you before when you were about to zip ahead 10 years to talk about your your second experience. Maybe we can jump into that now.