Navy radar watched objects fall 80,000 feet in under a second
Pilots who chased one off San Diego described a wingless craft that seemed to fly faster than sound without a boom, and a second crew caught it on video.
Popular Mechanics · Navy Officer Says Underwater UFOs Are Legitimate Threats. The Evidence Is Hard to Ignore.In November 2004, radar operators aboard the USS Princeton, a cruiser sailing with the USS Nimitz off San Diego, picked up strange contacts. Radar showed contacts high at 80,000 feet before they fell to the ocean surface in under a second.
Two F/A-18 pilots assigned to the Nimitz, Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight, flew out to meet one of the objects over the Pacific.
What happened next is why the encounter is still discussed more than 20 years later. From the air, both men said they saw the same thing hovering just above the water: a smooth, white, oblong craft about 30 to 40 feet in length, featureless, without wings, windows, or markings. It looked, in later descriptions, like a Tic Tac mint.
Fravor began to circle downward for a closer look. Then the object shot away. It vanished in seconds. “It just disappeared. Like a bullet out of a gun,” Fravor later said.
What stood out was how it moved. Later accounts said the craft lacked the visible control surfaces and heat glow normally seen on jets or rockets. It seemed to be moving at supersonic speed, yet it produced none of the loud cracking sound usually heard on the ground when aircraft break that barrier.
The strike group sent up a second flight, and that crew managed to record the object on an infrared camera, a sensor that sees heat rather than visible light. The footage showed a small white shape traveling into the wind and turning in ways the reports said familiar aircraft cannot match.
Questions people ask
Why does it matter that there was no sonic boom?
A sonic boom is the loud bang heard on the ground when an aircraft pushes through the speed of sound and piles up pressure waves in the air. Military jets almost always make one when they go supersonic, and the boom can be heard for miles. An object that appears to fly that fast without making the sound suggests it is not pushing air aside in the normal way.
Just how fast is a drop from 80,000 feet in under a second?
80,000 feet is about 15 miles up, roughly twice as high as airliners fly. To cover that distance in under a second means traveling tens of thousands of miles per hour, far faster than any crewed airplane. It would also require braking from that speed to a hover almost instantly.
What does an infrared camera on a fighter jet actually see?
An infrared camera detects heat instead of visible light, so it can track engines, exhausts, and warm airframes at night or through haze. Navy jets carry them in sensor pods for targeting and identification. In this case, the important detail was what the camera did not see: the expected hot plume from an engine.