More Truth About the 2017 UAP Videos

In our last newsletter, we asked three questions about the white Tic Tac objects reported in 2004 near the Nimitz carrier group off the coast of California.^[1] And a similar object spotted outrunning commercial airline traffic from Nevada to Oregon in October 2017:^[2]

1) Is there any evidence that this Tic Tac object may in fact be a top secret US craft?

2) Does anyone else in the Pentagon say officially that these craft may be US technology?

3) Have there been any other sightings of such Tic Tac-shaped craft in US airspace?

All three questions can be answered with a surprising, ‘Yes.’

First, there is some admittedly debatable evidence that the Tic Tac object in 2017 might be a top-secret US experimental craft. For one, this object was first spotted on radar somewhere over southern or southwestern Nevada.

That’s where the US military maintains many of its most secretive testing facilities.

Most people know about Area 51, part of the Nevada Test and Training Range,^[3] also called Groom Lake. It’s located 83 miles north-northwest of Las Vegas. Not far away is the Tonopah Test Range,^[4] where advanced aircraft like the F-117 Nighthawk were flown.

Tonopah is a mere 70 miles northwest of Groom Lake. There’s also Nellis Air Force base, less than ten miles northeast of Las Vegas, and home to the US Air Force Warfare Center, the largest and most challenging air combat training center in the world.^[5]

Such a concentration of advanced combat and top-secret aircraft testing locations suggests the Tic Tac craft may have been one such craft, though its proximity to such locations alone is not hard proof.

But if this craft were an intruder, it’s hard to explain why the US Air Force never tried to intercept it, nor alerted any other military assets like NORAD of its intrusion. Of course, it’s possible they did alert NORAD, and might even have attempted an intercept.

But in the wake of NORAD itself releasing details (after several FOIA requests) about trying to intercept the craft,^[6] it seems unlikely that any Air Force response in Nevada airspace would have been hidden from prying eyes.

There’s another singular detail in the October event that we referenced earlier: that the craft originally appeared on radar, but then disappeared from radar, though it was still visible to pilots and aircrew. There is an explanation for this, and it directly involves advanced stealth aircraft like the US-built F-22 and F-35.

One problem with stealth aircraft is their invisibility to commercial radar, which makes for a significant flight hazard when flying in commercial airspace. One way to make such planes visible is for the stealth craft to be equipped with Luneberg detectors.^[7]

These are also called Luneburg lenses, small angular metal pieces designed to reflect radar and make them visible to civilian traffic control. When F-22s and F-35s fly in commercial airspace, both in the US and in NATO countries, they carry these reflectors, usually bolted in place by their ground crews.^[8]

But it’s possible for Luneberg lenses to be discarded by a plane in flight, if they’re mounted by a magnetic attachment. All the pilot needs to do is to turn off the magnetic link, and the Luneberg lens would fall away from the craft. Some analysts suggest this could be done by a stealth aircraft if it wanted to approach enemy airspace originally as a commercial airplane, then discard the lens and continue on stealthily.^[9]

China currently has one advanced fighter, the Chengdu J-20 (see the image at the top of this newsletter), which has a retractable Luneberg lens.^[10] The original Chinese version of the lens was designed to make it more difficult for adversaries to determine its true radar cross-section, though it’s unclear if that’s the intended purpose of the retractable version.^[11]

There’s a third trail of evidence that the Tic Tac craft might be an experimental US vehicle, though this path is a little more indirect.

When the Nimitz aircraft carrier battle group detected the first Tic Tac object in November 2004, the group included the USS Princeton, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, which was the first Navy ship that detected the objects. It was responsible for vectoring in the F/A-18s that reported their own close-in sightings.

The Princeton, which carries the advanced AEGIS radar detection system, had been outfitted with a newly upgraded AN/SPY-1 passive electronically scanned array (PESA) 3D radar system.^[12]

Some researchers have speculated that this would have been the perfect time to test the new system with whatever secret aircraft the Pentagon had available. This isn’t hard evidence by any means, but it is a possible clue.

Another theory about the Princeton tracking the UAP craft includes the possibility that the objects detected on radar were anomalous readings from the new AN/SPY-1 system that hadn’t been calibrated correctly.

In fact, the ship’s own meteorological officer originally attributed the readings to airborne ice particles.^[13] The Princeton’s crew took that possibility into account: after the initial sightings, they recalibrated the AN/SPY system, which resulted, their systems operators said, in even clearer signals than before.^[14]

There are also reports from crewmen aboard the Nimitz that the ship had its hard drive data recorders, full of data gathered by the F/A-18s involved in the sightings, confiscated by unidentified men who landed in an all-black Blackhawk helicopter.^[15]

These ‘bricks,’ as they’re called, also included information gathered by one of the Nimitz’s E-2 Hawkeye early warning aircraft that had also reportedly recorded the craft on its own equipment.^[16]

Another officer onboard the Princeton had a similar encounter with two unidentified individuals, to whom he was ordered to turn over all the data recordings from the AEGIS AN/SPY-1 system.

One reason for these confiscations might have been to analyze how much data the most advanced US radars had taken of these craft, if they were in fact advanced US aircraft. What’s interesting is that these men who retrieved the data never bothered to debrief the pilots or aircrew that spotted these craft up close, as if their eyewitness accounts didn’t matter.^[17]

There’s also the estimate made by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Research Office (AARO), formed in 2022. He says the Tic Tac craft was perhaps a CIA balloon or some other top secret military craft that were being tested intentionally close to one of the Navy’s most capable combat groups.^[18]

This estimate was contradicted by a report from the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications program (AAWSAT), which began in 2002 and later became the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) in 2017.

That report stated that the unidentified craft displayed speed and turning capabilities ‘far greater than anything known to exist, (and) could turn itself invisible both to radar and the human eye,’ which rendered even the best US aircraft’s capabilities ‘ineffective.’^[19]

The Tic Tac craft, if that is indeed what they were, seem to have a very baffling history. Yet they also appear to be of significant interest to the US government, who worked to retrieve all electronic data collected by the Nimitz battle group.

The final question yet to be answered is this: Have any other Tic Tac objects been sighted in US airspace?

As we’ll uncover in the next and final installment, the 2004 Nimitz and 2017 Nevada-to-Oregon Tic Tac craft are far from the only such craft seen in US skies.

^[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

^[2] https://www.twz.com/16079/airliners-and-f-15s-involved-in-bizzare-encounter-with-mystery-aircraft- over-oregon

^[3] https://now.northropgrumman.com/area-51-aliens-or-just-a-simple-myth-understanding

^[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah_Test_Range

^[5] https://installations.militaryonesource.mil/in-depth-overview/nellis-afb

^[6] https://www.twz.com/tic-tac-uap-incident-included-in-72-newly-released-range-incursion-reports

^[7] https://theaviationgeekclub.com/these-devices-make-stealth-aircraft-visible-on-radar-screens/

^[8] https://theaviationist.com/2022/03/02/f-35-without-reflectors-over-poland/

^[9] https://www.quora.com/Can-an-F35-drop-its-luneburg-lens-The-F35-can-keep-the-luneburg-lens-to-set- up-a-trap-and-then-drop-them-to-become-stealth-and-attack-the-enemy

^[10] https://www.reddit.com/r/WarplanePorn/comments/1gjxqt8/retractable_luneburg_lens_will_this_ become_the/

^[11] https://www.twz.com/22534/high-quality-shots-of-unpainted-chinese-j-20-stealth-fighter-offer-new- capability-insights

^[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-1