Tic Tac witness Kevin Day: interview for The Nimitz Encounters (2019)

0:00 For the record, if you could just tell me your name and the rank at the time of the incident. My name is Kevin Day. In 2004, I was on board the USS Princeton, stationed out of San Diego, California. And my rank at the time was a senior chief petty officer. So in the Navy during that time, what was your job? What kind of role did you play there? To put it simply, I was a radar man and worked in combat information center, or we call it CIC on the ships in the Navy. And my job was to man the radars and ID everything that flew in the skies. And I also sat a position called anti-air warfare coordinator where if we ever had to go to war, I was the guy that was going to launch the missiles and kill shit. In addition to that, I was an air intercept controller. When the super hornets take off the carrier, I'm the guy that takes control and takes

1:01 them to the fight and gets them home safe. So when people hear you talk and see you on camera, give us a little indication about the level of experience you had during that period of time in your career. When the Tic Tac UFO encounter went down, I had a little over 18 years actual sea time on Aegis type ships. And the Aegis ship is our newest weapons system afloat. And it's got the SPI-1 radar system, phased array radar system, and I was an expert on that. So take us back in time to that week in November 10th-ish, around there, when you first became aware of something was going on. Maybe describe that scenario. Yeah, I was on watch. I was actually sitting anti-air warfare coordinator, AAWC is what we called it. And we were probably 100 miles, I forget how far exactly that day we were, off the coast of San Diego southwest, kind of off the coast of Mexico Baja.

2:03 And I started to notice these weird tracks that were popping onto my radar coverage right about on San Clemente Island. And the reason why I say they were weird is because they were appearing in groups of 5 to 10 at a time. And they were pretty closely spaced to each other. And they were 28,000 feet going 100 knots tracking south. And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, you know, that's kind of odd. I mean, I don't know anything that flies like that. They weren't on the calm air routes, the commercial airline routes. I wasn't really that concerned about them. I didn't consider them hostile for any reason at all. And we watched them for several days. And if we wouldn't have had an air defense exercise scheduled to happen on the 14th of November, maybe this whole thing maybe never would have happened. We maybe weren't that concerned about them. Why were you there with the ships out there at that time? We had received orders to, well, the war was still going on in 2004.

3:05 And we had received orders to deploy a little early. So we were out there doing what they call a tailored ship's availability training period, or ATISTA. And we had ourselves out there on the Princeton, and we had the Nimitz, and the air wing had just arrived on the Nimitz. So they were doing their pre-deployment training as well. And our big goal, as far as our ship was concerned, because we were an air defense commander, was to do an air defense exercise. So you're planning this, getting ready, and you start seeing these tracks that are unusual. What is the protocol? I mean, what do you do when you start seeing that kind of unknown aircraft or unknown objects that seem to not be anything that you can identify? What do you do? We, our goal when we're standing watching CIC is to identify everything that's in the sky. And we have certain protocols and procedures that we use. We go through a certain process to identify things, things including without getting too

4:05 classified about it or classified at all. We use a safety of, or a flight profile, excuse me, you know, exactly how they're flying. Are they on a calm air route? Are they not on a calm air route? Are they transmitting any type of identification friend or foe, which is an ID system that most aircraft will have? And we also consider if they're heading towards us or not, or heading towards something that we're trying to protect. And we put it all together and come up with an ID. And in this case, what happened with that system? We failed utterly to identify these things. It didn't meet any of the parameters for anything that was known. In fact, I asked Captain Smith about it, the air defense commander. He was stationed at Princeton, and he was baffled too. He said, well, maybe they're ice crystals. And I kind of had to laugh at that because I thought it was ludicrous. They were not ice crystals.

5:07 So, these puzzling tracks are happening. Is this like a one day, or is it something where you just keep coming back? The next day, somebody calls you down and says, they're back here? To the best of my memory, when I first picked them up, I was on the 10th of November, 2004, when I detected the first group when I was on watch. And I tracked them from San Clemente Island all the way down off to the Baja Peninsula in the Pacific there. And they went away, and another watch or two as I'm watching, the same formation appeared again. And over the course of three, four days, it probably counted up to that point, groups of five to ten at a time. There were probably 50, 60 tracks by then. Maybe they were the same objects repeating the cycle, or maybe they were different objects. We don't know. And when you saw these, it wasn't as if klaxons went off in there and, you know, red lights start flashing and everyone's running around.

6:08 Oh, as a matter of fact, the technicians, they actually shut down the radar. They were doing diagnostic tests on everything we had to make sure it was not a system malfunction. And it turned out that it wasn't. These were actually real objects. I had the highest spy track quality possible on these contacts the whole time. So when you're looking at the tracks and you see, like, a group of ten or whatever, are you able to isolate, like, one of them, find out more details on, like, one? Potentially, yes, you can do that. In this case, however, they were all pretty much similar, identical. The only difference being is the spacing between them. If I could describe the scope, you know, you're looking at your scope, you've got north and then you've got south looking at your scope. If you can imagine snowflakes slowly falling through the sky like that, that's kind of the way they appeared and tracked towards the south. And then you also described some maneuverability that seemed to defy known aircraft. Yeah, and so what happened was on the 14th,

7:09 we were going to do the air defense exercise. And in the back of my mind, that's when I determined I was going to become concerned about these objects, because we were getting ready to launch a whole bunch of aircraft in that same piece of sky, because we like to play right around in those altitudes. And my concern, of course, was safety of flight. So when Captain Smith comes down to CIC, I said, sir, you know, we've been tracking these for several days. I have no earthly idea what they are, and no one in combat knows what they are. And I highly recommend we send aircraft out there and intercept one and ID these things, because if we don't and we launch aircraft into this mess and there's an air-to-air mishap of some kind, somebody's going to ask us why we weren't more curious. So stepping right before that day, you noticed that some of these were dropping down in a very fast speed and that you played that back. I'm going to take a pause right now, because a jet ski is coming, but November 14th rolls

8:09 around, and you've been watching these things, and so you have a conversation with the captain. Why was that day in particular kind of a good day? The 14th at, I believe it was 10 a.m., we were getting ready to do an air defense exercise, which is simulated combat training, very high-fidelity, realistic-type training, and we were going to have aggressor aircraft launch off the beach off Miramar and North Island Air Station and basically attack the strike group. And it's designed to be real high-fidelity type of air defense training. And so you talked to Captain Smith, and they decide to interrogate one of the things. What happens next? Fast Eagle Flight was event one launching off the carrier, and he was up doing a functional check flight, getting ready to play in the 8X. And he was under control of the E-2 Hawkeye, the wallbanger. And so I talked to the wallbanger on the radio. I said, hey, basically, in layman's terms,

9:10 do you have contact on these contacts? And they were like, no, we see them on data link, but our radar is not holding good track on them. We got an audio coming, like jet skis. Yeah, we can just pause it for a sec until these guys go by. Okay, so Fast Eagle Flight is on an 8X mission. They launch, the Hawkeye launches. Tell me, start up there about, you know, reaching out to the Hawkeye. We've seen these contacts. Captain Smith orders me to intercept one of them. So I just, I went back to the console. I picked the closest one that was to us. And I was going to, I had intended to let the Hawkeye do the intercept because they already had control. It was just easier. But because they didn't have a good radar picture, I took control of the aircraft and turned out to be Commander Fravor's flight. He was actually the CEO of the VFA-41, the Black Aces squadron.

10:10 And so we vector him towards that position in the sky and real quiet on the radio. I'm just giving him bra calls, which is bearing range altitude. It's called bra, to these unknown bogey group. It's pretty standard intercept. It's how he gets to the merge plot position. Basically what the merge plot means on the radar, you got two objects in the same vertical piece of sky. So when I'm looking at the 2D display, it looks like one radar blob now. The symbology merges together. As soon as he got to the merge plot position, the object that he was intercepting dropped from 28,000 feet down to 50 feet above the water in 0.78 seconds, as I found out later the next day. And when you're in CIC, and this is going down, are you hearing this radio talk back? We were all hearing it. I had, in the overhead speaker, I had the air intercept control comms in the speaker. So we're all hearing Commander Fravor talk to the air intercept controller.

11:10 Now, I was actually air intercept controller's supervisor. So I was standing right behind the actual AIC, who has elected not to come out publicly for his own reasons, which I honor. But I was helping him doing the radar interpretation, and I was helping him with the external comms, and I was helping him keep the front table in our CIC to inform what was going on. And then he left his wingman up high in altitude. He was going to go down to the surface and take a look at this thing because, you know, he was like, wow, what was that? And as soon as he did, this thing comes popping, and it did a barrel roll around him. And next thing I hear on the overhead comms was, oh, my God, oh, my God, I'm engaged, I'm engaged. He was just pooping his pants. I'll never forget that. And this thing went back up to 28,000 feet and continued 100 knots going south like nothing interesting at all. It just happened. So in—I'll just, like, wait until the sky goes by.

12:11 I think what I missed. Okay. Okay, so in fighter parlance, what does that word mean? When you hear that someone's engaged, what does that mean? It's kind of a misleading term because it does not mean we're shooting at each other. It just means we're doing basically a dogfight with the opposer or the bogey. So he's in a turning—he's in turns with the contact at this point. And I know you guys were curious. So on that talkback, did you hear any descriptions over the talkback? Or the only thing you heard is he's engaged with something. Correct. So he didn't describe it at that point? No, no. It was much later when he came out and told us what it looked like. So describe how you guys later looked at that drop-down from the sky, incredible speed. You went and looked at that again? The next morning, of course, I don't even think I slept that night because it was pretty eye-opening experience, to say the

13:15 least. So I got the lead technician who's also elected not to come out. And we played—we have a system on board called Cooperative Engagement Capability. It has the ability to record everything. So basically, we just played it back as if it was actually happening live again. And with the software and stuff, you can do analysis of the radar. And that's when I learned that it was actually less than a second. It went from 28,000 feet down to the surface of the ocean and turns out 0.78 seconds. And does that mean anything as far as speed? - It was incredibly, it was unbelievable. Because normally what would happen if a normal aircraft did that, first of all, it would fly apart. It wouldn't be able to withstand the G-forces. And there would be multiple sonic booms. It would be boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And this did not make any sonic booms. - To clarify one thing, there's been some comment that, you know, there were no women on the radio.

14:17 And there's been comments saying there's a woman on the radio and there was fear in her voice. And do you know if it's possible that there were any women controllers on the air that day? - I think that story originates from the tactical action officer on board Princeton. And she jumps on the radio and she asked the flight about their weapon status, just to make sure they weren't carrying any weapons. - When some people hear that story, they think that perhaps they're trying to see if they do have weapons because it might be a threat scenario. It kind of comes off as that. Do you think that that particular comment was to make sure they did not have them? - To make sure what we're doing was safe. You bet. You know, the exercise environment. And the last thing we wanted to do is start shooting stuff. I mean, we were off the coast of San Diego. And you know, the exercise that we do, safety is always the most important thing, everything we do. - I'll just let that guy go by. I'll just let that guy go by.

15:20 So, you know, we have the comments with the loadout. And you guys don't normally carry armament on the aircraft during training. - That's correct. Unless we're doing an actual live fire exercise. And then it's quite limited at that. But they do have a mock-up missile they carry on the wing that does everything except for blow up and take off off the wing. It's got all the telemetry and all the same electronic gear on it. - Okay. So pick that up again. There was a story about the weapons loadout and that could have been a female? - It was. It was a female. - So they won't hear my... I'll let this guy go by. Nosey tires. There was a question about concern or fear in one of the controller's voices. And tell me that story.

16:20 - It was shocking. After we saw this object drop out of the sky like it did and spy tracked it perfectly all the way down to the surface. It had highest track quality possible during this whole time. - It was quite shocking. You know, on a combat team like we had, the government spends millions of dollars training us to do exactly what we were doing that day to ID stuff. And there was a lot of experience in that room. The captain had 28 years. I had 18 years. My air controller had been, I think, in for 12 years at that point. And numerous deployments in wartime operations. And because no one knew what this was, it was pretty shocking. It was very humiliating. Actually, I'm still mad about it. I want to make that ID. - And if you look over on the other side of combat, who's Gary Voorhees? - Jerry Voorhees was a technician on board the ship

17:20 in charge of some of the ballistic missile software and also in charge of the cooperative engagement system, capability system. - And do you recall him being there like-- - Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I definitely remember-- - Acting like he's trying to fix something over by your console. - Excuse me, I remember Petty Officer Voorhees. - He said, "Oh, I need to check something over here." - Yeah. - He told me he did that a couple of times. - Yeah, I think they made excuses to be up in combat checking all this out 'cause it was a big rumor. The whole ship was abuzz with us at this point. - Give me a little play-by-play. It was before, I believe, the intercept, but you picked out a track and went upstairs and describe why you went up there and what you did. - After this intercept tap, you know, I was never a UFO guy. You know, I was just a pretty normal person, I would have to say. And in the back of my mind as an air controller, I always thought, you know what, if I ever get the opportunity to intercept a

18:21 UFO, I'm gonna try to do it. So after Commander Fravor made this intercept, I was saying, "Aha, it happened. "This is, it's definitely an unidentified flying object. "Don't know what it was, "but I wanted to make sure it was real." You know, so I went up to combat, and when I was off watch, even when I was off watch, I was usually up in combat anyway. And I was sitting at the console, I just picked the closest object to us, and I got the relative bearing from the ship, ran up to the bridge, and we have a big set of binoculars up there called big eyes. And it was just after sunset. The sun was actually down. But it was twilight, I guess. And I slaved over to where the relative bearing was, up about the right altitude, and I saw a white light in the sky. And I have to confess, it was pretty boring white light. There was nothing special about it. But it was definitely there. - Was it moving around or jumping around? - It was around kind of a white fuzzy light.

19:21 I didn't distinguish any shape other than around. - Could you tell by the size and the track you grabbed before you went up there, how far away it was? - It was about 40 miles from the ship at that point. - So maybe just tell me that one more time and include that distance. So you look through the big eyes. - Yeah, I was off watch, and I was up in combat taking notes on these things. And now I'm really curious, 'cause here's my opportunity, and we intercepted a UFO, I think. So my plan was to go up and look at it through the big eye binoculars on the bridge, which is just a big, powerful pair of binoculars. And so I picked the closest one in the ship about 40 miles away or so, I guess, if I remember correctly. I run up to the ship, get the slave over to the relative bearing at about the right altitude, and saw this white light in the sky. - So Commander Fravor is directed by you guys. He goes out there and he comes back.

20:22 So other fighter jets are being launched this time. What was a series of events that occurred after that first one? - So again, we're preparing for the air defense exercise. Now we got all the squadrons launching off the carrier, 'cause they're all up gonna do their functional check flights, make sure their air crews are ready and their airframes are ready. And by this point, we've got all of these objects on the data links, and everyone's listening to the control comms on the radios. And so all these guys, you know, fighter pilots are pretty gung-ho. They're pretty type-A guys and gals. And they started making intercepts on their own without any controller. They just picked an object that was on the data link and they drove towards it. And as soon as they did, all the objects in the sky, they all dropped out of the sky from 28,000 feet down to 50 feet. And then when the interceptors left the scene of action, they all popped back up at 28,000 feet and they kept going south at 100 knots as if nothing at all interesting had just happened. They wanted to be left alone. - Give me a kind of a play-by-play of

21:26 November 10th when you're just kind of minding your own business and what starts going down? Will somebody, you see it first or tell me that. - I can't be certain, but I do believe I was probably one of the first person, people to spot these contacts. And I didn't think anyone else had seen them for a while, but it turns out later that I was wrong. Other people were very curious about them too. They just, because it wasn't really in our area of concern per se. It wasn't considered any type of thing that we needed to deal with. - And looking at the scope, describe what you were seeing. - I was seeing, we were about a hundred miles off the coast, San Diego to the Southwest, out in the Pacific. And upward, the Channel Islands are San Catalina Islands. I started detecting groups of these contacts five to 10 at a time.

22:27 28,000 feet going 100 knots, which is really slow for that altitude. - And in your mind, could you correlate that with any known aircraft that would be doing that? - In my mind, I was thinking, I don't know what the hell these are. The only thing I could think that it could possibly be was balloons of some type. It just happened to get in track by the radar. - Would you possibly see something flying that slow, like a bird or since, could anything fly that slow up there? - Hot air balloon potentially. That's a little high for a hot air balloon, I would have to think. So my answer would have to be no. Something going that slow, that high is gonna fall out of the sky. - So one of the next things that you guys did is a calibration or a test to reset the radar? - Yeah, the technicians, Gary Voorhees and his crew, they basically shut down the radar. And they were doing a diagnostics test on

23:28 everything we had just to make sure it wasn't a malfunction of some kind. - And so this goes on for a while and you decide to go up to the bridge and look out to see him? - I did see him. After the intercept on the 14th, I was gonna go up in combat, I was taking notes, of course, and my whole goal was to eventually write a message and present it to the captain and report this thing. But just to be sure for my own peace of mind, I wanted to take a look with my eyes. My eyeballs don't lie, maybe. And so I got the relative bearing to one of the closest objects. I went up to the bridge on the big eyes. I looked in that piece of sky and I saw what I have to confess and say was just a boring white light in the sky, moving really slow. And I gotta remember to get that order 'cause that would happen after a favor. So on the 14th, you talked to the cat, you have an 8X going. And at that point, you decided to talk to

24:29 the captain? - Yeah, the captain came down to combat for the morning brief. He usually came down in the morning, see what was going on, see what the night watch was doing and just kind of hang out for a little while, drinking some coffee. And I said, sir, you know, we've got this air defense exercise scheduled here to commence lunch in here in a couple hours. And we have these objects in the sky and no one in combat is concerned about them being any type of threat, but we are all concerned about them being a safety of flight issue for us 'cause we're gonna have a whole bunch of our aircraft in the sky here in the same piece of sky. And I recommend that we intercept it. - Yeah, okay, so pause for a sec. - So you got an 8X going on and you recommend that you intercept? - It was my recommendation to the captain. I'm a top gun air control intercept and supervisor. And my real big concern was safety of flight. I didn't want no one to run into these things. And because I told the captain, I said, "You know, captain, if we launch and we just happen to run into one of these things, our Versa VISA, somebody's gonna be curious

25:30 why we were so damn incurious." And he said, "You know, you're right. You better take the flight that's up and go ahead and vector it over there and see what it is." - Give me that kind of sequence with the Hawkeyes and the fighter jets and how that went down. - So, event one off the carrier just happened to be Commander Fravor's flight. He was, the name of his, the name of his flight was called Fast Eagle. And the Hawkeye had already launched. So the Hawkeyes got control of the Fast Eagle flight. And so I go over to the Hawkeye. I said, basically in layman's terms, I asked the Hawkeye if they have any radar on these objects. And they said, intermittent, we got them on data link, but we don't really have that really good of a radar picture. And at that point I actually took control of the Fast Eagles and gave them to, gave them over to Princeton for control. - And so what are, what are some of the calls

26:31 that happen as they get closer to these objects? - Yeah, standard, we call them bra calls, bearing range and altitude. And basically I'm just telling their crew where the object is relative, you know, the bearing from them and the range from them and the altitude so they can drive towards it. - You kind of take control and you're doing the bra and so on. And at some point there's a call for inquiry about weapons. - Yeah, the tactical action officer, the TAO jumps on the radio. Her name was Lieutenant Elders. And she just point blank asked the Fast Eagle flight if they were carrying any type of weapons. And there was a stunned pause on the radio. They come back over the radio and kind of jokingly say, "No, we just got CATM-9 training missiles and they're not coming off the wing." - And so, so you get to a merge plot. What happens next? - The merge plot happens. The object that they were intercepting drops

27:31 from 28,000 feet down to about 50 feet off the ocean. And what I found out the next day was 0.78 seconds. - And you're hearing a talk back. You're not actually seeing the dog fight, but you hear. - We had the external communications in the speaker in combat so everyone could listen to it. And the next thing I hear is Commander Fravor come on the radio going, "Oh my God, oh my God, I'm engaged, I'm engaged." Just pooping his pants. - So yeah, like the Black Aces are launching at this point off of Nimitz. I think you said that was self-directed intercepts or? - Yeah, everyone's coming up. We're gonna do the A to X shortly after. And everyone's coming up to do functional check flights, make sure that all the airframes are okay. Still pretty much in a training mindset. Everyone's doing training. And they're all seeing these objects on data links now and they're here in the comms. So they started intercepting these things all on their own.

28:32 - And have you heard anything more about it? Obviously, there was a bunch of pilots that saw these things. Have we ever heard any more from that or no? - Very, very few of the pilots have come out publicly. Now, I've heard through the grapevine that some of them have come out, but it's been private, maybe even before Congress testimony. - So after this kind of all happened, I know then you talk about going up to the bridge and looking at it. Apparently, there was one pilot that did get some targeting pod footage of this. And you guys saw that? - I did not see the video when it was being shot live. I didn't have that capability in CIC. However, the next day I received in my email on the secret, on our secret email system, I received a video snippet. I believe it was an MPEG video of that intercept. The FLIR-1 video, the now famous FLIR-1 video. - And at the time, obviously, it was like a long time ago.

29:32 Was there anything different or the one that we have now is what you saw? - The one that we've all seen on TV was identical to what I saw the next day. Just about the same quality and everything. - So you can vouch for the authenticity of that? - It was, it's extremely authentic, yes. - And can you comment it, you've seen it, do you see anything in that that would be abnormal, like it wouldn't necessarily be a normal aircraft? - The fact that it just zorched off all of a sudden, off to the left, you know, it took off. In fact, it reminded me of the Star Trek Enterprise when it goes to warp. It went from stationary and just zorched out of there, which was highly unusual. - And how did this encounter, this whole thing kind of come to a conclusion? Was it that you guys just had other stuff to do and they didn't show up anymore or what happened? - After the 14th, we continued to get other groups up until about the 16th of November.

30:33 And altogether, based on my rough count, we had a total of about a hundred objects. And what you say beyond that is pretty much true. We went to do other stuff and it was pretty much, turned out to be not a concern, I guess. Now, it turns out I found out later that Commander Fravor was pretty upset with the Stratt Group Admiral for not doing any type of report or message on it. I think he's still upset about that to this day. - And I'm trying to think if there was anything I missed there during that week. And we kind of talked about it all the, those, those basics and the zipper net and all that. And so you kind of been carrying this with you as you go through, you know, the 2000s. And what happened that kind of made you want to like start putting this out? - I left the ship in 2000, right at 2005

31:35 when we got back after training, I didn't go on the subsequent deployment. And I transferred to ComNet AirPak in Coronado, California. And I did my a couple of years there and I retired. And I immediately went to work for a defense contractor out of Virginia. And I tried to tell people about this intercepting UFOs, but you know, even my own family, I don't think really believe me. I mean, how do you believe something like that? Not knowing what else to do, I wrote a book about it. I wrote a short story, it's called "The Seer." And I put some other short stories in there with it. And I published it in the Library of Congress. My mad plan at the time was to just in case the story ever did come to light. Maybe my book would provide some sort of evidence that it really did happen. And many, many, many years later, it did happen. It became public and my book is now evidence. When you were working at the golf course in your town and that day, tell me what happened.

32:38 It was December of, no, correct me on the date here. Was it 17? Yeah, it was December 17th of 2017. Yeah, 2017. I was actually waiting tables for free 'cause I had suddenly become extremely empathic. And so I was gonna, I was volunteering to save the golf course. Not just myself, but others in town, too. It's just 'cause it's so important to the town. And I think it was CNN that just happened to be on that day. Or maybe it was cut in, we were watching the Golf Channel. And next thing I know, I see Commander Fravor on TV and I see that video that I'd seen all those years ago. And kind of soon thereafter, you began finding yourself on TV and on the news. Yeah, it didn't take long. I, Robert Powell had done a YouTube video and talking about this. So I, I drop a comment in the comment section on YouTube and say, hey, I was there, I was the air

33:38 controller and contact me if you want to talk about it. He did right away. And from that point forward, my life has pretty much changed again. Were you sort of surprised that when you found out that the U.S. government had a study about some of this? Not really, you know, 'cause I was never a UFO guy, but I've listened to coast to coast AM radio for years and years and years. Since the late '90s, Art Bell, George Norrie, George Knapp. So I always had an interest in it. Probably, I would, not a strong interest, not a weak interest, but I was, you know, curious about UFOs. I mean, people say the government have some big conspiracy and so on. Do you think that they know all about this? Or do you think they're kind of like trying to figure out the answer just like everyone else? That's a very good question, and I don't have the answer. When you saw Commander Fravor on TV kind of

34:38 all by himself up there taking the brunt of this, how did that make you feel? I felt an obligation. So maybe say his name and-- I was actually waiting tables that day for free, working for free. And he comes on CNN, I believe. And in the back of my mind, I was like, "Oh, my God. I have a duty to speak up, 'cause I was his air controller. I gotta back up this guy because he's telling the truth right now, and someone's got to stand with him." So I did. So how do you feel about your brothers and your sisters that maybe are holding this now? What do you say to them if they feel troubled by it and-- I dealt with this all on my own for many, many years, and it was not a very pleasant journey to go through 'cause no one really believes you. But now things have changed, and anyone out there that is struggling with this and wants to reach out, there is now a group that you can reach out

35:40 to and get help and support and vindication. Some may feel that, you know, people are gonna laugh at me or people have laughed about it, just make a joke, and it's really not worth it dealing with it. And to be honest with you, you know, it's probably shouldn't talk about it. I mean, did you find that, or do you think it's more like a good experience that you've had? Overall, it's been a good experience. Although there's been troubling aspects from it. They, you know, and I've just learned all this stuff myself, you know, just recently. And one of the things that I've learned is when people encounter, have close encounter experiences, it changes you. It changes your personality. It can change you physiologically. It can mess with your psychology. And I, indeed, have had some of those effects. I didn't know it was happening. I didn't relate what I was going through

36:40 personally with the tic-tac incident. And that's only just, I've only been able to figure that out recently. So anyone else that's going through that type of thing, you don't have to do it on your own no more. And you will be vindicated. What do you think? Do you have any personal ideas over all these years, what these things were and where they came from? I do not have a clue and I hesitate to speculate because it's not my role. My role is to describe the story and convince people that, yes, this event really happened and these objects were really real. But what they are, I have no idea. I have my personal feelings, but I don't want to express them because it can do nothing but destroy the credibility of the larger story.