Multiple F/A-18 Pilots Disclose Recent UFOs Encounters, New Radar Tech Key In Detection

nivek

As Above So Below
Multiple F/A-18 Pilots Disclose Recent UFOs Encounters, New Radar Tech Key In Detection

https%3A%2F%2Fapi.thedrive.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F05%2Fasddacc.jpg%3Fquality%3D85


In a major breakthrough in what could be the most fascinating story of our time, five U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet crewmen have recounted a number of incredibly strange encounters with unidentified flying objects off the East Coast of the United States. Two of the pilots went on the record. The surreal craft they encountered had performance that defies known propulsion and aerodynamic capabilities, and are described as looking like something akin to special effects you would have seen in a sci-fi movie circa the late 1980s. The pilots' accounts also point to a major sensor upgrade on their aircraft that made the presence of these craft even detectable at all.

What's even more important is that these events took place as recently as 2015, over a decade after the now famous Nimitz incident with the so-called 'Tic Tac' craft occurred. This is all coming to light—at least officially—just weeks after the U.S. Navy said it is changing its procedures for its service members reporting unexplained phenomenon in their operating environments.

The War Zone had recently published an in-depth expose about the Navy's procedural changes, a number of other revelations surrounding the Tic Tac incident, and more recent developments, that concluded that the phenomenon is indeed real. That hard to swallow fact has huge implications, regardless of the objects' origins.

Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been in the Navy for a decade has come forward after talking to the Navy and Congress about the events he and his squadron mates witnessed between 2014 and 2015. In a New York Times article published on May 26th, 2019, Graves described how strange craft would appear in their training airspace and persist there not for minutes, but many hours, or even days at a time.
These things would be out there all day... Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.
The persistence of these craft was in no way the strangest thing about them. Beyond being able to drop tens of thousands of feet in a matter of a second or two and possessing flight characteristics that are unobtainable with known technology, the unannounced visitors looked like nothing else on the planet. But before we get into all that, let's rewind to how all this began and talk about a very important detail that was largely glazed over in the New York Times piece.

Graves and another pilot who was willing to disclose his identity—Lt. Danny Accoin—were both Naval Aviators serving in Navy Strike Fighter Squadron 11 (VFA-11), the Red Rippers, based out of Naval Air Station Oceana near Norfolk, Virginia. Strange anomalies started showing up on their Super Hornets' radars in 2014, while they were out on training maneuvers in the vast warning areas off the Atlantic Coast between Virginia and Florida.
https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fthe-drive-cms-content-staging%2Fmessage-editor%252F1558945667624-dd32.jpeg

Skyvector.com
You can see the massive warning and military operating areas that lay off the southeastern seaboard of the United States. All of those large dashed boxes are areas that can be restricted for military training. These swathes of ocean and sky are critical to national security as they let aircraft, and vessels in some cases, operate far from the civilian population in a similar manner as they would on deployment. This includes flying at supersonic speeds for fighter aircraft and using powerful sensors and electronic warfare gear that may interfere with daily life near populated areas.

According to Graves, Naval Aviators really began noticing the objects in their training areas after a major technological leap in air combat capability was fielded across much of the U.S. Navy's combat aircraft inventory. It's a technology that isn't detailed in the New York Times' report, but one we talk about here constantly at The War Zone—Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars.

Before the mid-2000s, Navy tactical fighter aircraft were equipped with mechanically scanned array (MSA) pulse doppler radar systems of varying capabilities and power outputs. So-called 'legacy' F/A-18AC/D Hornets were largely equipped with the AN/APG-73 radar. This was a very capable MSA fire control radar with multiple air-to-air, air-to-ground, and synthetic aperture ground mapping modes. Still, it was developed based on 1980s technology, as the vast majority of the fighter radars in service with U.S. military aircraft were at the time.

(more on the link)

.
 
Top