UAP Navy Encounters: Patrick “PJ” Hughes on the Hawkeye data taken from the Nimitz (Tim Ventura, 2023)

0:00 I'm Tim Ventura and we're joined today by Patrick P.J. Hughes, who served in the Navy as an aviation electronics technician primarily on the E-2C Hawkeye and C-2A Greyhound airframes. In November 2004, Patrick was a second-class petty officer attached to VAW-117, the Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron, and was with the squadron conducting air wing and battle group exercises during the infamous UAP encounters that have made headlines worldwide. So, P.J., welcome, sir. It is a true pleasure to have you with me here today. Glad to be here. You know, we're talking about the infamous Nimitz UAP incident. I want to jump right in by asking if you can tell us a little bit about what your role was and how you were involved in the TIC-TAC incident. Well, my main role in the whole event was not seeing it, not interacting with it. I wasn't flying. I wasn't doing any of that stuff.

1:02 I was an avionics tech on the Hawkeye. We launched and recovered the aircraft, which means we powered it up. We turned everything on. We tested everything. The crew got in and went flying. They came back. We turned everything off. We took our stuff out. You know, rinse and repeat, depending on how many times you're flying that day. November 14th was, I mean, as far as we're concerned, an ordinary day. Started out that way, at least. The night before, we had gotten maintenance tasking to record one of the flights that day for what we had assumed was testing purposes, maintenance purposes. You know, it's not, it's a routine thing. It happened fairly enough that it wasn't a big deal. You know, you take an extra 10 seconds to hit the button that says record, click some buttons, and it stays in the background, and that's all you really have to do. So, by luck of the draw, it happened to be my flight that was told to do that because I knew how to do it. Not everybody did.

2:03 So, I go up, turn on the airplane, power everything up, hit the record button. We're up there about three hours before the plane actually launches to test everything, to make sure everything works. Go through all our systems. The air crew shows up. You know, you turn it over to them. You tell them everything's set up, what problems you might have had, if any. You know, give them the whole spiel. They get in the plane, start the engines, go off the pointy end, they go flying. When they go flying, I go back downstairs, I wait, I eat, I grab a snack, I do whatever, and then when that plane's scheduled to come back, I put all my gear on, I go back up on the deck, we help tie it down, we talk to the air crew when they gather the airplane, we grab all our classified stuff out of it, we take it back downstairs to our shop, put it in the safe, and normally, that's the end of it. Yeah. Two odd things kind of happened after this flight. The air crew kind of skipped right by me,

3:04 which is, you know, normally the mission commander will take a moment and give you a head start on any problems. You know, they'll come out of the airplane saying, we have some issues with this radio, or can you take a look at this, something, just so if we need to get that plane flying again real quick, you know, we can have a head start on fixing any issues that might be there. They didn't really talk to me, they just kind of hightailed it, went below deck. I go through my normal pulse flight procedure, you know, we have to touch every knob, check every screw, check every switch, make sure nothing fell out. Landing on an aircraft carrier is like crashing the car, it's not a gentle process. So we make sure everything's still there and everything didn't break when you do it. You know, 99% of the time, everything's still there, nothing broke, but you always got to prepare for that, you know, that 1%, so that's something you do. And we essentially, at that point, me as the avionics guy saying, when I walk away from that plane now, it's ready to go flying

4:04 again if we needed to. That's my post-flight job. So I take my classified hard drives, the back of the Hawkeye, the mission systems, all run off of basically the hard drives in glorified cases. This is 2004, hard drives still weighed a ton, they weren't white. So when you're carrying six of them out of that airplane, you call them bricks, because that's about what that feels like you're carrying. So I take these down, go down into our shop, lock them in the safe. Navy safes are TPI, two-person integrity, it always takes two people to get in them, two people to open them. Everything's logged, so, you know, we both open the safe, we both verify everything went back in the safe, sign everything back in, shut the safe. And I think you're done. You know, my other half to the safe left. He went to go down to the meth decks to get a snack or to the bathroom. At this point, I don't remember where he went, but he left.

5:04 Well, so let me jump in. This sounds like, so what you're describing is kind of a day in the life, right? This is just kind of an average, yet another day. It sounds like when they came off the plane, they were a little bit distracted, they were thinking about other stuff, but, you know, but no giant indicators. Now, during this period of time, from what I've heard, there were these UAP contacts, right? This has been happening for like something like a week before this, off and on. So, you know, there was some, how could we describe this? There was some weirdness, I guess, in the background, you know? So, having talked with the other witnesses after the fact, it was a much more pronounced event on Princeton than it was on Nimitz. Okay, okay. Nimitz, it didn't become a joke until pretty much that day, the 14th, when Fravor intercepted and everything happened. That was really the first we kind of heard most of it on Nimitz. I'm not saying people didn't know.

6:05 I'm just saying, most of us lower guys, we didn't kind of find out about this stuff until they started. No, no. You know, I think that's an excellent point. Okay, so Princeton is here, and I don't want to jump too far ahead of my questions, but Princeton is basically your radar craft, right? It has the SPY-1 system on it, and so that was doing all of the command and control. It was, you know, very involved with this stuff. Nimitz is your aircraft carrier. You've got your flight wing on it, and so these are very different roles. They have very different focuses, and yeah, stuff that's, you know, these strange tracks on the Princeton probably aren't going to make it over, and they're probably going to not make it down through the chain of command to the general crew. Right? That makes total sense. Yeah, and it's also a big difference. Princeton's got a crew of like 350 or so, and Nimitz is, you know, 5,000 plus. Yeah. It's a whole different world. Yeah, well, so, I mean, again, you know, just kind of yet another day. The Hawkeye comes up. It comes back.

7:06 They unload. You take the hard drives. You put them in the safe. Everything in the Hawkeye was being recorded. So, like, Hawkeye radar data, electronic support measures, all of this was being recorded under these bricks. You'd said, if I remember right, in a past interview, these are basically Barracuda hard drives in a special case. And in this case, you guys were testing some stuff that we're not going to talk about, some unrelated stuff. These were scheduled to go off ship for data review anyways in a couple of weeks, right? At some point. I mean, essentially, those recordings would stay on those hard drives until we turn on our test machine in the shop and delete it. So, ordinarily, it's something when we pull back in, somebody shows up with a squadron to pick them up. Or occasionally, you know, we mail them back to Pax River in Maryland. You know, it depends on exactly who had asked. Never got to the point of figuring that out. Yeah. So, what's interesting, though, was, and

8:06 again, one of the things that makes your story so interesting is, you know, again, you're just, it's day-to-day, a pretty normal day. After you put these things in the safe, from what I understand, your skipper came to your area, two men in USAF flight suits, and asked for those hard drives. And so, you've said in the past, this was unusual, number one, because it's rare for the skipper to come to you. Usually, you guys are going to them, right? But then, number two, here are these two personnel that weren't from the ship. You know, where we were is off the beaten path. You actually had to, you know, walk outboard on the ship, go down a level, through a hatch, back up a level, just to get to our shop. You know, it wasn't a straight shot. If you ever look at a picture of the flight deck, and you look over on the opposite side of the island, and there's the landing lenses, a bunch of light things that stick off the side, we were right below that.

9:09 You know, our ready room was all the way up on the front of the ship. So, there's not a huge distance, but it's a fair distance. But like I said, if they want us, they pick up the phone and say, hey, come down here. Yeah. You know, we're the lower ranking people. We do the legwork. They're not going to come to us unless it's, like I said, I can count the times on one hand that they came to our shop, and that was very rare. So, yeah, he shows up at the door. Our door's got a cipher lock on us, a combo lock. You can't just walk in. You have to know the combination. In theory, he's allowed to have the combination. At some point, he was given the combination. Whether he knew it, forgot it, didn't come up, but he knocked on the door. It's a very small hallway. Directly across from our door is another door to BLA, which is the landing aids department for the ship. They run the plat camera and all the deck lighting and stuff like that. Like, their door is, like, two feet from

10:09 ours. It's that tiny of a hallway. So, they're all crowded in this tiny little space right outside our door. So, yeah, you know, we opened the door, and now they're all standing there because I can't get into the safe without the other half of the combo. So, he wasn't gone very long, but it's an awkward silence, and that's why I can say so definitively that they were U.S. Air Force uniforms because, you know, I had two to three minutes, give or take, to sit there and stare at these things. You know, their insignia is different. You know, they've got different patches, different namesapes. You know, there's enough of a visual difference that most military people can tell the difference, you know, from far away, a green flight suit to green flight suit. But when you're in a small space and you're, you know, two feet away from them, you can tell the difference between, you know, an Army flight suit, a Navy flight suit, or an Air Force flight suit. Yeah. These guys never spoke. They never said anything. They just stood there and looked as clueless

11:11 as, you know, as they could be. But essentially, the skipper at that point asks for the bricks that were off that flight. And once the other half of the combo gets there, we open up our safe. We check which ones are on the flight. We pull them out. We put them in our bags, start to hand them over and just politely say, okay, who are we signing these out to? You know, what are we logging these at? Because we can't just hand them to you. We can't just let them walk away. We have to have some kind of documentation. And he essentially says, sign them out to me. And that's somewhere that there's a log, probably destroyed at this point, but somewhere for a long time, a log existed of those bricks being signed out and never being returned. So, but essentially, you know, we handed them over. The three of them turned around, left, and that was it. So, now, in one of the passengers, you were saying there was no paperwork.

12:12 But, so they did sign them out, though. I mean, they signed these things out. The skipper signed them out in the log, or? So, there are two ways to look at it. Our log book was essentially just serial numbers, aircraft, or, you know, in absence of an aircraft, if we were signing them out to the ready room for some reason, we'd write ready room. You know, it wasn't a highly fantastically detailed log. It was more so we knew what was used, when, in case we had issues. But anything classified in a squadron belonged to the skipper. It's all ultimately his. You know, it's his signature that's bottom lining everything. So, just because paperwork wasn't done way down on my level, doesn't mean there wasn't paperwork done above me, that I just wasn't privy to. Ah, okay. I have to assume that there was a chain of custody paperwork done, and there was proper paperwork done above my head, but I have no

13:14 way to prove it. Yeah, no, it's interesting. So, you know, and again, this is based on, you know, for the audience, I guess. I've watched two or three of your past interviews. I went through those, like, two days ago, just writing down notes. And so, you know, if anybody wonders where did, you know, where did Tim get this, or, you know, all of this comes out of stuff that you've said in the past, and I'm trying to go through points that were really kind of intriguing, I guess. So, one of the things that I wanted to ask was, did these guys look nervous, I guess? Did they look, I made a list of questions here. Did officers are listed excited or bored in good shape, or desk jobs, right, kind of out of shape? You know, I'm just trying to think back. Do you remember anything out of the ordinary about these two folks? They looked bored. You know, I've said, I've said mostly that I, and again, I have no way to actually prove it, but I believe they were actual just couriers. They were two guys who were qualified to

14:15 transport, qualified, classified material that were in the right spot at the right time, and they're like, hey, you two, you're going out to pick up this. Somebody's going to give you this stuff, and you're bringing it here. You know, each squadron on the Nimitz had its own couriers. I was one of them for my squadron, and it's stupid training, and you get a little card saying you're allowed to transport classified material. I have a very funny story with the California Highway Patrol, if we ever get there, and classified material. But that's another event. But they're not going to take, you know, we only had like six ATs in our squadron at the time, split between two shifts. But there wasn't a ton of us. They're not going to take two of us away to go, you know, transport classified material somewhere for who knows how long. You know, they're not necessarily going to pull somebody from the ship to go transport it. So, whoever asked for this stuff probably just went to, you know, nearest Air Force base and their place and said, I need two qualified couriers.

15:15 They're going here, picking us up. You know, that's – I think they were couriers. I don't think they had any actual clue of what the heck they were doing other than picking up things and taking it from point A to point B. Well, that was one of the things I wanted to key on because, you know, this idea of, you know, these are not – does not sound like these are men in black, right? With the stereotypical black suit, sunglasses, you know, the little beeper that blanks people out. You know, it's – yeah, sounds like these guys were just doing their job. What else is interesting, though, and again, just from going through, it's just stuff that was kind of bumping around in my head. I was thinking about this, and I was like, wait a minute. For these guys to get there, I think you were saying it was something like 10, 15 minutes after the Hawkeye landed. A short period of time, the fellow who knew the other part of the code had just left, right? I was like, for those guys to get on the ship, you were saying there's only two ways on this ship. Basically, the C-2A Greyhound, and you would have known about that because that would give groupers in charge of that. I used to work on them, so I'm normally the

16:15 one who got stuck up. Yeah, so it's either that or a helicopter. And so they didn't come off what you called the COD. So you guys are probably about, in terms of a helicopter, probably about an hour off the coast, right? 30, 35 minutes flight time for an H-60. Okay, okay. So, you know, and then you figure, so the amount of time it takes to find a couple of people, you know, to send requisition orders through, all that kind of stuff. You know, it seems like when these events happened with Commander Fravor and these strange events with the UAP, whatever, I'm guessing probably when Kevin Day called it into his commander, there must have been somebody moving pretty fast behind the scenes to say, we want that data. I can agree with that, and there's also two ways you can look at this, and I'm going to clarify that this is my opinion because my opinion has gotten twisted on Twitter the last couple of days about certain things. This is nothing but my opinion and my

17:16 interpretation of, based on the knowledge I have, is Princeton has been tracking these things for an entire week. So, there's plenty of time for people to be told, messages to be sent to the shore, and all of that. We had gotten the request to record the night before. So, again, plenty of time for people to already be planning the stuff. You know, the timing of everything that happened and the coincidence that we were recording at the same time, you know, Fravor enters, was directed, and all that's coincidental. It just all happened to happen at the same time. You know, there was no, we didn't, we didn't decide what flight I was, I was manning up until that morning when we got the flight schedule. We kind of, I want to do this one, I want to do this one, you know, somebody else says, I want to do that one. We decide that, you know, that's not predetermined.

18:16 So, I could have recorded any flight that day. So, like I said, everything happened coincidentally. It just all fell into a perfect little row of dominoes, I guess. Like I said, there was plenty of time for stuff to be put into motion before we ever started flying that day. You know, like I said, all the time I had believed it to be a true coincidence that we were recording that, you know, we got the message the night before to record one of the flights for maintenance purposes. But, you know, years later and you start thinking about it, you know, it does seem also awful coincidental that we were told to record the night before and then we took, you know, somebody came and took the hard drives. Now, it makes it seem a lot more like it was somebody set into motion the events the day before or a couple days before or like I said. Yeah, yeah, no, that does, it does make

19:17 sense. So, there were probably some eyes elsewhere that were kind of keeping an eye on things, right? And, you know, again, these radar returns have been there off and on all week and, you know, who knows? But, yeah, one of the things that interested me definitely was the turnaround time in those two individuals getting there to pick up. You said it was two men, I think, right? Yes. Yeah, so, you know, that's, there's an unknown part of them being there. I have ideas of other things I did while they were there, but I have no way to prove it because I haven't been able to talk to anyone. Well, if it's okay, let me interject real quick. Do you think that they also took the data off of the fighter jets, right? Because they were the videos that eventually ended up in, well, they eventually got leaked, but at least we know where they went. So, the data and stuff coming off the fighters is obviously completely different than the way the Hawkeye does it. You know, they were, if I remember correctly, using eight millimeter tapes.

20:19 Yeah. And Dave Fravor has been adamant that nobody ever came and took his tapes. And I have no reason to suspect otherwise. You know, those videos could have easily been put on the Sipranet on the ship at the time and gotten out that way, which is, I believe, the common understanding of how it happened in the first place. Okay, there you go. Those videos ended up on some German website in like 2007, if I remember correctly. You know, that was the first time they'd actually seen the light of day. And the fact that they were compressed and grainy and kind of poor quality kind of tells you they were, you know, stuck on a USB drive or emailed or, you know, kind of tells you they'd done a little traveling and wasn't the raw footage, so to speak. Yeah. But what I was going to say, and it goes right in line with what you just asked, is, you know, the Nimitz had all kinds of ways to record data and communications and all kinds of other stuff.

21:23 And they were literally at the end of the hallway where my shop was. You know, I used to, one of my tasks when I, that workup cycle was basically on my way to work. I stopped in the ready room. I logged on the Sipranet, which is a secret internet. I checked for message traffic related to any of our crypto stuff. I then went from the ready room. I stopped at a couple spaces. Basically, it all, it all equips to be the CIC for the Nimitz, all the combat information center stuff. But they all had different mods, like the ASW mod, the tactical information center mod, a bunch of different little rooms that had all their stuff in it. And I'd stop basically on my way and get the, you know, information for the data links for the day. If all the stuff we needed to set up the Hawkeye and, you know, that was just my route to work every morning. So I knew those people and I said, they were right at the end of our hallway and they could have easily left my work center, gone there and taken stuff from them.

22:25 You know, there's a lot of other stuff that could have taken. I don't know if they did. It's a guess, but there's a lot of other raw data out there that they could have had access to. Well, and that makes sense. I mean, I'm just, I'm completely guessing. But, you know, if I was some commander in a base somewhere, I would just say, look, grab all the data that you can. We're going to need to take a look at it later. You know, we'll need to move that off site. The thing that did interest me, though, was, you know, again, you've said that these two men showed up and they looked forward. But the time that it would have taken from them to get to the shore and when they actually arrived, to me, that indicates that somebody behind the scenes was kind of in a hurry. Right. Because they didn't. Yeah. So, yeah. So, so, you know, and that's, that's, that's interesting. It's almost the stuff that you don't notice offhand. Right. But it's, it's matching up the times. And I'm like, okay, you know, I, again, I'm just kind of spitballing, but I'm like,

23:26 somebody was probably scrambling because how long do you think it probably would have been between when Kevin Day called into his superiors and by the time those two guys arrived, do you think? If you were going to guess. I mean, the, the entire, um, again, and this is based off of memory, so I could be slightly off on time. The entire, the, the, the Hornets were double cycling. So they were up to like three, three and a half hours. And obviously, so are we. So you got to figure from start to finish, their whole flight time was, you know, three and a half to four hours. And the narrative has always been that this kind of happened towards the beginning of their flight time because they were, they were pulled away from flying from their, their actual, um, training to, yeah. To go through and their normal training is all controlled by the Hawkeye. So Princeton literally had to call up the Hawkeye, say, can we get two control,

24:26 control of, you know, two fighters and the Hawkeye's like, okay, here, you can have these two. So again, the fact that it happened to be Fravor and Dietrich and, and their wizos is all purely coincidental. That just happened to be the, probably the two closest, you know, fighters to what Princeton wanted. And, and those were the ones that were sent to, there are a lot of other airplanes up that time. So like I said, that, if that happened towards the beginning of the flight, you know, that still leaves like two hours, two and a half hours. From when that, when that stuff started happening, that, you know, somebody on the shore could have been, all right, this is already happening. Let's get somebody going, you know. The communications weren't just limited to, to the strike group. You know, there's common, there's plenty of ways for those people on shore to, to be tied into what we're doing and listening and watching.

25:27 So there's all, all kinds of ways, you know, that those decisions could have been made on the spot in the middle of that flight and still had time to get people out there. Yeah. No, it's, it's interesting though. Again, from, you know, just from looking at the timelines, it sounds like someone was kind of in a hurry behind the scenes. And I think that's a good thing, right? That's not necessarily nefarious in any way. It just shows that this, this got the attention of the right people in the right place. Right. So, you know, so you, you also mentioned one of the things I wanted to key in on was another Navy sailor. I think this was Dave baby. If I remember right, he was airborne in the Hawkeye and witnessed a tic-tac form up with the E2C during flight. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I mean, it sounds like he didn't get a good visual observation on it, right? He did. They, they got a very good visual observation. The Hawkeye's got, when it's running a full mission, it's got five people in it.

26:29 So normally got a pilot, co-pilot and three naval flight officers in the back. Some squadrons had in-flight tech programs. Periodically, we have things we can't fix on the, on the ground because the plane's designed that certain things won't turn on unless they're up in the air for, for safety reasons. So they, that's program gives us the ability to put a, an avionics tech up in the air to troubleshoot some of this stuff and different squadrons utilized it different ways. Our squadron utilized him a lot more than they probably needed to. He, you know, he had to fly four hours a month to get a flight pay. And it seemed like once some officers reached their limit for the month, like they met their requirements for training and flight pay and all that, his name seemed to go on the flight schedule more and more. He, he liked to fly. They liked him, you know, so it was a match made in heaven that if they didn't want to

27:31 fly, they can stick his name on there and he'd jump at the chance. Yeah, no, I think I get what you're saying. It sounds like he's kind of filling in the gaps, right? Exactly. So like I said, his primary mission was just to be up there to fix stuff, but he flew a lot more than, than that. So he was sitting in the radar officer seat because that's the only one he, he can be qualified to sit in as an enlisted guy. And the other two officers, obviously in the back were regular NFOs. They were flying and obviously they're the common phrase is they're the quarterback of the air wing. They're controlling everything that goes on. So yeah, all the fighters are up there doing, you know, air defense exercises, basically playing good guy, bad guy. You shoot me down. I try and shoot you down and we, and we just play, I say play, but they're training. Yeah. So like I said, that's, that's what the Hawkeyes up there doing. It's controlling that entire, you know, all the ranges that people keep pointing out on Facebook. All that was, you know, primarily under the

28:32 Hawkeyes control. You know, it, it, it saw everything there, it knew everything there and that's their job. So the windows in the cockpit of a Hawkeye are obviously always open so they can see what the heck they're doing, but they're lined in gold. Most aviation cockpits in military are lined with gold to protect them from all the, the radiation from the radar and everything. Okay. They have from the cockpit, it's like 260 degree view out there windows of how much they can see. The guys in the back have three tiny little portholes. Normally those are closed and covered with an RF shield. So the energy from the radar doesn't come back in and bake them like potatoes. When the radar is off, they have the ability to push a button, those windows pop open and they can see. They're not doing much. If they don't need the radar as a primary tool for whatever they're doing, they'll

29:35 turn it off. You know, they can turn the radar off and use the IFF system and be able to completely control everything just like they would if the radar were on. You know, if you're not in a high threat environment, you don't necessarily turn everything on. You don't necessarily use everything on. So while they're up there at this point, they had, you know, the radar off, the windows were open. They still have their backs to the windows. You know, somebody, somebody up front says, Hey, look out your windows. There's a little handle on the seat. They pop up, they rotate their chairs and now they're looking at the windows and all three of them in the back. And obviously the two in the front get a nice look of the tic-tac object, the same description pretty much as everybody else has about 30 to 40 feet off their wingtip. Oh. Hangs out for a minute or two and just kind of goes away. Well, no, that sounds like an amazing visual sighting then. So the trick is, is the reason they blew by me when they got off that plane, because

30:38 they went right down to the skiff and they were debriefed. The completion of their debrief, they were all given NDAs and they signed it, told not to talk about it. So there's very little that they'll tell. When I first reached out to Dave Beatty to kind of tell him my portion of the story, I had reached out to the guy we're calling Roger. He's like, Hey, can you, you know, at least vouch for me and say, Hey, I'm not crazy. This stuff really did happen. So that's how Roger had gotten in contact with Dave Beatty. And Dave will even say it was a very, very limited exchange of information. You know, he kind of confirmed me. I believe he confirmed that he saw the object and basically then said, that's all he can say. It's taken me a long time to coax information out of him and one of the other

31:38 NFOs. And it's not, I call it operating in a gray area with their NDAs because they're not directly telling me anything. I'm not directly asking. It's conversations about stuff that happened. And then them almost dropping clues that I can understand because I know how the stuff works. And filling in the blanks. Yeah. Well, and I was going to, you know, I was going to ask about that also. I was going to ask about that. I mean, what, what are some of the pieces that you put together? Right. And again, you know, it's, it's always a challenge. This again, when I was watching your past videos, you know, especially in the military, you have a close knit group of people, you have camaraderie, you guys know each other. Right. And in, even if you don't specifically know someone, you know, their job role, you know how they were trained. And so there's kind of a bond there. And one of the things that I, I immediately

32:40 wondered about was like on the Princeton, they said that there were alien jokes going around. They were playing independence day on the, you know, on the, the lunchroom TV or something after the, you know, after it happened, you know, yeah. And there must've been a fair number of rumors going around too. I mean, did any of those have, you know, and it's always a challenge because the, the level of accuracy is way lower for rumors than it is for anything else. But then I knew very little of everything that happened till, till well after the fact brought, this is obviously at this point, 20 to 30 minutes after they had stopped at my work center to take our bricks that Roger finally wandered back down because they were occupied with their debrief and everything. And he walks in and as I mentioned before, dude likes to fly. He's always got a shitting grin when he comes back because he got to go flying and the rest of us were stuck there doing God

33:40 knows what. And he didn't have the normal mood that he normally had when he'd come back. And one of the guys like, you know, basically, why do you have a stick up your ass? What's going on? And he started to say, you know, we're up there flying. We saw some stuff. It was really weird, but we're not supposed to talk about it. Timing of our division chief walking in the door at that moment and hearing the phrase, but we're not supposed to talk about it, killed the whole story. Oh, OK. If you're not supposed to talk about it, shut up. Yeah. And that was the end of the conversation. I fully believe based on the environment, how much I know him, how much he knew all the rest of us. If my division chief had not walked in, he probably would have told us the whole story then and there and a NDA or not. But obviously, he couldn't say anything. They weren't allowed to say anything. The discussion got kiboshed.

34:42 And other than the alien movies on TV, cartoon and the flight plan, most of the ship had no clue what's going on. Even those of us who could have had an idea still had no clue what was going on. You know, most of the joking and that type of stuff happened in the officer world, in officer's country. You know, their giant frat house in competition between all the different squadrons and all the pilots, you know, they can be relentless with each other. It's indirectly some of the pranks that I knew about or, you know, was asked for remote assistance with on certain occasions. You know, those guys are relentless with each other. So, if they have a chance to pick on somebody, they're going to do it until they can beat it into the ground. I get what you're saying. It was a lot different on their side of the fence than it was on the enlisted side of the fence, is I guess what I'm trying to say. Well, you know, I think in the greater context of things, it's probably good, right? It sounds like everyone was really doing

35:43 their best and doing their jobs. And, you know, and that's something that I think is kind of being forgotten in this, is that, you know, this is an anomalous event, right? And you guys, I think, did great overall. I'm just saying that as a civilian, Joe Average on the street, right? But, I mean, I know if I was there, there would be probably some panic attacks happening. So, you know. I kind of got a clue. We were training for deployment. You know, our air wing, forget the rest of the ships, our air wing alone had been basically balls to the wall since May of 2004. You know, we took the Ronald Reagan from Norfolk to San Diego. We got off that and jumped right into our deployment cycle, right into air wing training, right into ship training, right into all of that. You know, we had no break. When you're out at sea, you're training constantly. The ship is training, each department is training, the air wing's training, and there

36:45 is so much going on. It's, you don't, yeah, you have plenty of time to, you know, watch Family Guy or play Grand Theft Auto, whatever we did to occupy our downtime. But there's constantly drills going on. There's constantly training going on. We were, hypothetically, we didn't deploy until, what, May of 05 is when we finally left our deployment. We were told anywhere from basically like December to May, we could be told we're leaving for deployment. So they're trying to forward cram as much training as they can to get us qualified to leave as soon as they need us to, if need be. So we were busy out there. I mean, 18-hour days, 19-hour days, the flight schedule starting at, you know, 7 in the morning and going until, you know, 11 or 12 at night. But, you know, we were busy. It's not like we necessarily had time to be focusing on all the other stuff.

37:46 Well, and things happen, too. You know, when you were talking about most of this stuff you learned after the fact, this is going to sound dumb. This is kind of one of my own stories. But I work AT&T Wireless in Redmond and here in Washington State, the Seattle area, earthquakes are really, really rare, right? And, you know, around the turn of the millennia, we had a few big ones. And so one of them, we had a smaller one, but you could still feel it. And I was at my desk at work and people started moving around, acting kind of funny. And, you know, I was working, right? And I'm like, okay, doing our stuff. And someone comes up to me, you know, and says, you know, why aren't you getting, why aren't you standing under a doorway? And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? And they're like, there's an earthquake happening. I'm like, oh, okay. You know, and this is like, I mean, we're like, you know, 45 seconds into it or something like that. People have been milling around. I had no idea, you know, and I wasn't the only person who was like that. So, you know, stuff like this does happen.

38:48 And then you learn about it after the fact. And, you know, in my case, it was like, I feel like I kind of missed something. I don't know if you felt the same way or not. It's like, man, this big thing happened and I wasn't really there, you know? I mean, you got to think about it. There's 5,000 or so people on that ship. There are parts of that ship I've never seen, you know, and I lived on it for, you know, two and a half deployments. There are still parts of that ship that I've never been to. There's people on there that I've never seen. I used to get random emails from my mother when I was out to sea. Have you met so-and-so? You know, I know their mother and they're on that ship. I'm like, no. I don't, for the most part, other than some people in the air wing or random people on the ship that I was forced to associate with, the only people you really talk to were people in your own squadron. You know, you went to the mess deck with the same guys. You were in your shop with the same guys. You were in the birthing with the same guys. You went to the gym with the same guys.

39:50 You know, aside from that, there wasn't a ton else to do. You know, you might have gone to the chapel. You might have gone to the library and interacted with some other people. But if you didn't do all that, most of the people you're interacting with are the same people you interact with every day. Yeah. So, it's not like you're necessarily, oh, I just ran into all those guys who work in ops and I'm suddenly hearing all the stuff they did. Or I'm suddenly talking to civic guys and, you know, here's a whole bunch of stuff that happened. It's just, if you're not regularly interacting with these people, there's so much stuff you can miss. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, still, I mean, you know, I guess in the larger context of things, you were part of something that's absolutely historic, right? I mean, this has gone on to, you know, it's being analyzed by Congress and, you know, and actually, that was one of the things that I wanted to touch on. And I've got this in my questions that I've been basically ignoring for quite a while. But, you know, somebody had asked you in a

40:50 previous interview, they'd said, you know, could this be something top secret that was being tested against the US, you know, and you'd said that's possible. You've seen stuff like that happen before. Now, as an interviewer, I was looking at that. I was like, you know, you'd think, though, that somewhere along the way, I mean, again, this is on, you know, this is like the National Defense Authorization Act, right? This has gone all the way up to the top of the chain. At some point, if this was just some top secret project, they would have pulled somebody aside and said, hey, you know, no, just this is ours, just kind of leave this one alone, you know? Yeah, that's a very, very good point. And it is a difficult question to answer. You know, it's rare to stick something in a high pressure test environment like an entire carrier strike group. So many different ways stuff could go bad.

41:51 At a minimum, if they were testing something nearby and there was a possible risk of safety exposure or us accidentally running into it or something like that, at a minimum, like the strike group admiral would know, probably the skipper or the Princeton, skipper or the Nimitz. You know, there'd be a, they might not know the details. You know, they wouldn't be told, hey, we're testing this and this is what it is. It's, they'd be told there's some, you know, testing happening nearby, blah, blah, blah, blah. Keep an eye out. If anything happens, please let us know, you know, just enough to, to reduce the safety risk. You know, that's, it's a stupid phrase that they drill into you from basically like day one in bootcamp is safety is paramount. Yeah. Safety trumps all else. You know, there are many times you don't think it doesn't, but when it always came down to it, safety did trump everything else. That was the whole reason Kevin Day was able

42:52 to make his argument in the first place. You know, he'd been trying for a week to pull fighters to, to go chase after these things, but they never were close enough to be a threat to the air wing. Once they got close enough to be a potential threat to the air wing safety wise, they had no choice, but to let Kevin. Well, in that context, it sounds like it was an absolute threat to the Hawkeye. If it came up right off the wing and it was there for, you said about a minute, that's, that's too close. Yes. So, and it's that, that's why it's hard to say that they would truly test something like that on us. You know, cause at a minimum, some of the high ranking people would have known. And if Kevin Day then brought that, Hey, it's a safety of flight issue. Captain would have been like, it's not, it's under control. It's okay. Don't worry about it. Yeah. That was my thought. Stay in your own lane. Yeah.

43:52 So at some point, somebody would have just pulled them aside and said, you know what, just don't worry about it. Exactly. Yeah. I've been told that plenty of times in my Navy career. When you want to know something, when you want to know something, you don't need to know it. And they're just like, you need to, you need to let it go. Well, you need to just forget about it. You need to walk away. You need to. And again, going back to those, going back to those. And again, this comes out of your past interviews, but the, uh, you know, the, those two men, the two careers who arrived within the USAF uniforms, you know, the, the timing of that indicates that this, this wasn't planned, this, this wasn't normal operations. This got somebody's attention, you know, and, and that's a good thing. I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to make a conspiratorial argument. I'm just kind of like, okay, this obviously someone behind the scenes was like, you know what, we got to take this seriously and we're going to take some action. So. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Well, PJ, on that note, let me thank you so much for your time today. And let me thank you for your service as

44:53 well. I always do that to people who have served. And I genuinely mean that. Thank you for your service. And, you know, I, I hope that your story, I mean, I know that your story is helping fill in the bits and the pieces of a much larger story. And I think that this is really transformative. I don't think any of us know where it's going, but. No, I completely agree. Yeah. It's where we live in unique times. So. Yes, sir. Okay. Well, thank you again, sir. And have a wonderful day. You too.