P.J. Hughes: the E-2 Hawkeye's data recorders taken after the Tic Tac encounter (UFO Megacon, 2019)

0:00 well hey folks welcome back to my youtube channel thanks a lot for joining me here today well we're still at the UFO Megacon in Laughlin Nevada and we're lucky enough to have another amazing Nimitz 2004 witness this is PJ Hughes yeah PJ you gave an amazing presentation at the panel last night you were one of the last people to speak but we did get John yes I think they almost forgot about you Tim but you were contributing there and you have kind of a really interesting vantage point on this whole incident right so you were responsible for the so-called data bricks on the peak to Hawkeye right and can you tell us what what happened and what you saw um unlike the other guys I never saw the object I never saw the tic tac I've seen the video but not not the tic tac itself but the Hawkeye records a whole

1:02 ton of information and it stores on data bricks that we take out of the airplane at the end of the flight we store them in our safe after that flight the flight that was actually airborne during Fravor's intercept yes my commanding officer showed up at our door with two guys in Air Force uniforms and took those bricks up that were off that flight mm-hmm and we left and I never saw them again still have no idea how they got on the ship or when they left the ship but they came took them and left and they were wearing uh Air Force flight suits with Air Force insignia um so they definitely came was that kind of unusual to see Air Force personnel on a Navy ship how often does that happen rarely and usually it's um in certain positions like for for cross training purposes but yeah never are they kind of really there never really there yeah that's it's an abnormal abnormal thing to see them on the ship so you were ship side you weren't in the air but your job was to be the custodian of the data correct it's a

2:03 technical position yeah I mean I maintain the Hawkeye fix the Hawkeye you do all those things yeah maintain the Hawkeye fix the Hawkeye the electronics yep radar navigation communications all that we send it flying they break it comes back we fix so you're an electronic specialist correct and did you have a secret clearance yes you did okay do you did you take that those data hard drives and put them in a safe or something what what's the chain of custody we normally when you're carrying anything classified you normally have to have two people but because we're on a ship and you can't really get anywhere yeah you're reduced to one person because it's nonsense you're not gonna get knocked up by the same guy you work with to take your classified stuff so basically take them we go straight down to our shop we put them in our safe it's a standard drawer safe you know in it here we have 30 to 40 of these different things for for all the airplanes and the plane itself takes six of them so it's quite a bit of stuff for them to come and take and they're in the safe and we put them in the safe and we lock the safe and they

3:05 stay there and we have them tracked by serial number so we know what serial number flew on what airplane on one day so we can troubleshoot problems or any of that and when our commanding officer came and took them he just said sign them out to me sign him out to him yeah so literally wrote his name in there expecting at that point they were coming back right right and they never came back they never came back well I'm pretty sure that log doesn't exist anymore it's probably been shredded at this point yeah somewhere there's a log book entry that's never been signed back in because they took those bricks and we never got them back is this commanding officer someone who's publicly known or we're just going to call him your commanding officer it's not hard to find out who it was be hard to know but I haven't been brought names did he ever did you ever have a conversation with him about this no he was not the type of person you really had those conversations with now I've had an extremely friendly commanding officers not that he wasn't friendly yeah but he wasn't the person yeah you kind of ask those stories about did you know what was going on at the time no until I saw Dave

4:08 Beatty's video I kind of figured it was one-off story well I hadn't really talked about it maybe said it a couple times like Gary said when we were drunk but it was really not a story at that point but I saw Dave Beatty's video I ran across it completely by accident reached out to him and kind of told him the stuff I knew yeah you know and once I got connected with with Gary and Kevin and Jason it's like there's a whole bunch of the story that I wasn't really remembering yeah now I was like oh yeah that actually happened and I'm also lucky enough to speak for a co-worker of mine who was actually in that plane at the time oh you had a co-worker yeah we've called him roger to protect yes that's right that's what you did last night yeah yeah he doesn't want to come out he's got security clearance he's got a government job he doesn't doesn't want any of that so he was flying and he saw the tic tac he saw it it formed up with the airplane the five guys in that airplane warmed up yep all saw it he

5:09 signed an NDA which is why he doesn't want to say anything got it got it but he he honestly did me a favor when I started talking to Dave Beatty to confirm you know my story yeah because Dave had no reason necessarily to believe me you know I could prove I was there I could prove all that but you know it's just a story at that point until somebody kind of cooperates it and Roger was nice enough to kind of talk to Dave offline and be like yep this happened this happened gave some basics and basically that's all I can really tell you because I signed an NDA and I have to keep my mouth shut about everything else did he tell you what his feeling was seeing this object out of the window of the hawkeye what did they say amongst themselves in the hawkeye they obviously seen it on their instruments right yeah I mean they saw it because everything the princeton's tracked they saw yeah the radar on the hawkeye at the time was not fast enough to track those objects but princeton's radar was right but we still saw it via the princeton's data um they were very they heard all the radio calls you know they're listening to

6:10 everything that's going on um because they were controlling fravor up until they turned him over to uh kevin day right right oh I see that's how it works so they're controlling him until kevin day says we want this f-18 to go out and do an intercept yeah when the hawkeye's airborne it's primary air controller until it's air controller until somebody asks for otherwise I think I get um and you know they turn them over so they're listening until all this point they're trying to figure out what's going on just when everybody else is and then all of a sudden the same thing pops up inside them a fighter jet's got bullets in it at least might have training missiles but at least has live bullets yeah a hawkeye has nothing right there's no arm movements no nothing you know they're not even flying in country so they don't even have handguns with them yeah they have nothing so nothing you know it's gonna you're gonna be a little scared at that point a little spooked yeah something comes off how close was it um he didn't i mean close enough that they saw they could see it it's not a huge object so it's an aircraft they didn't he didn't really specify like it was right on the wing or anything um but yeah when he he whenever he liked to fly so whenever he

7:10 went flying yeah he was always very happy when he came back like way too happy you want to smack him upside the head sometimes yeah when he finally came back off of this one yeah he was quiet he was not he was he was not his normal self so something wow something kind of disturbed him on that flight yeah so one more question how quickly did the air force guys and your commanding officer show up to get the data bricks after you had taken it off of the p2 with the timing is rough but it would have been within a half hour of me really quick yeah that because i mean i hadn't locked them up in the safe very long just locked them up and they say give it hand it over by the yeah because we have we have a couple jobs we do on the airplane before we we come back downstairs and make sure you know they didn't break anything so you just put them in the safe they're pretty much fresh in the safe and they yeah it's crazy it actually took them a couple minutes because it's two-sided safe you need two different combinations so the other half of the combination had gone to the bathroom so we actually had to wait a few

8:11 minutes for someone to come back you need two guys to get in that safe it's that secure yeah crazy okay pj thanks very much appreciate your time thanks for coming forward yeah yeah okay anything we can do all right we'll talk to you yes sir