Joe Murgia

Notes and Quotes from the Military “Tic Tac” Witness Group Interview at UFO MegaCon, March 27th, 2019

Panel consisted of Kevin Day, Gary Voorhis, Jason Turner, PJ Hughes, filmmaker, Dave Beaty and producer/writer, Robert Kiviat, known for “UFOs: Best Evidence Ever Caught on Tape” and other network shows including the infamous Alien Autopsy that aired on Fox. Kiviat was the moderator for the panel discussion.

Kevin Day, who was a Senior Chief Petty Officer and radar operator aboard the USS Princeton, began by explaining that in November of 2004, they were conducting training exercises off the coast of Southern California. They had received orders to deploy early so they were trying to get a whole bunch of stuff done real quick before they deployed because the war was still going on.

Approximately, on November 10th, Day started witnessing these strange tracks on his radar scope. He wasn’t really concerned with them because there was a lot of air traffic off the coast of California and they were a significant ways from the strike group. So they just monitored them and reporting them to “higher authorities” and maintained track of them. They stood out and were anomalous because they were at 28,000 feet and going at 100 knots. Day said that was, “extremely bizarre.” His entire job was to identify stuff and he had no idea what these were. None. Radar was shut down so they could do an extensive diagnostics to make sure it was working and these were real contacts. They were.

November 14th, they’re doing air defense exercises, also known as ADEX. Day pulls Captain Smith aside and tells him about the contacts that he and the others had been tracking and that he’s worried about “safety of flight” because they could have a mishap with one of these craft as they conduct their exercises. Day highly recommended that they go check them out. Smith agreed and told him to take the Fast Eagle flight and “go get ‘em.” Day said, “in the back of my mind, I was like, hell yeah! We’re going to intercept these things!” (audience laughs) It turned out to be his very last intercept in the Navy.

So he vectored the Fast Eagle flight (David Fravor, Jim Slaight and the other two) to go intercept one of these objects. Once Fravor arrived, one of these objects dropped out of the sky from 28,000 feet, all the way down to the surface of the ocean. Day found out the next day that it conducted this maneuver in .78 seconds. No sonic booms. 

Fravor maneuvered for a closer look and checked it out. The object shot off and went back up to 28,000 feet and continued tracking south at 100 knots as if nothing amazing at all had happened. Day and the others in the combat center were stunned: “What in the hell was that?”

Meanwhile, a bunch of other aircraft were taking off from the carrier and performing their functional check flights and getting reading for the ADEX. These aircraft were all monitoring the communications going on and they were also able to see the tracks of these anomalous objects. 

Kevin Day: “All of a sudden, we’ve got all of these aircraft doing autonomous intercepts all on their own. They wanna go check this out. It was pretty cool stuff. 

Robert Kiviat: “Real gung ho.” 

Day: “Yeah. Top Gun people. Next think you know, the whole sky is raining UFOs. It was going, ‘choo, choo, choo, choo, choo,’ down to the surface of the water. They track ‘em down there. They all pop back up into the sky, 28,000 feet at 100 knots, tracking slowly. As if they didn’t want anything at all to do with us.”

More from Kevin Day…

Starting on around November 10th, groups of 5-10 of these objects appeared off the coast of Catalina Island and the Channel Islands. In total, over several days, they tracked about 100 different targets. (To be clear, he and the others went on to explain that it could have been 10 objects tracked 10 separate times or 5 objects tracked 20 separate times. It wasn’t 100 different objects at once. It was in total. ~Joe)

He doesn’t believe these objects wanted anything to do with them or that they were hostile in any way. He never felt threatened or felt that the strike group was under threat, He felt that they just wanted to be left alone. Afterwards, he felt like they had “just intercepted UFOs. How odd.” He couldn’t sleep so he went up to the top of the ship and looked through the ship’s Big Eye binoculars at one of these objects right after sundown at twilight. And it looked like a “boring, white light in the sky. Nothing amazing.”

He retired in 2008 and tried to tell people about the story but he thinks even his family didn’t believe him. So, he wrote a short story called “The See’r,” which contained various facts about this event, mixed with with fiction and he published it in the Library of Congress so there would be a record of it in case the real story ever surfaced one day.  

The first time he heard that there was a public video of the Tic Tac encounter was when The New York Times article came out and the two videos (Tic Tac and Gimbal) were posted online. He was volunteering as a waiter in a restaurant at a golf course in order to help save it from bankruptcy. (He/they were successful) He saw news of AATIP and the Tic Tac come on TV and he dropped a plate he was holding. He couldn’t believe it. 

In the ensuing years, Day believes he has become extremely impacted by the event. This included personality changes and Level 5, Vallee/Davis post effects. He had no job and was spending all of his time volunteering. In the past year, he did some research and learned that a close encounter can change you and change you in ways that are amazing. Physiological and psychological changes. People that have close encounters can do things they have never been able to do before like play basketball, golf, darts, draw, play music. You become more empathic and prescient. You don’t care about money any more. It changes you. Problem is, you know you’re changing but you don’t know why. Said he learned about this via a private, Facebook group that discusses everything AATIP. 

Kiviat talks about how he’s trying to get Robert Powell to share whatever information he’s collected about the Gimbal incident from 2015, which is connected to the USS Roosevelt. 

Gary Voorhis was an Aegis computer and CEC (Cooperative Engagement Capability) technician on board the USS Princeton. Both systems record a ton of data. CEC allows multiple ships and planes to pool their radar and sensor information together. He said that he heard there were some interesting tracks being observed so he he made sure data was being recorded at all times. And he would make his way up to CIC (Combat Information Center) for any reason he could come up with in order to find out what was going on with these strange tracks. He also went up to the big eye binoculars. He couldn’t see them at night but could during the day. They were about 30 miles out and looked like a little white dot. It didn’t really do much but when it did move, “it moved so fast sometimes” that “it didn’t even register before and then all of a sudden, oh wait, it’s gone.”

Days went by and then he heard that they were sending up a plane to go after it. He thought, “Finally. We’ve been tracking these things forever.” Voorhis said that he heard they were streaming the intercept live on the SIPRNet (Wiki: Secret Internet Protocol Router Network is “a system of interconnected computer networks used by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State to transmit classified information”). So everybody (who had the proper clearance) packed into any place that had the SIPRNet.

Jason Turner was on board the USS Princeton and worked in the ship’s supply department and medical department as a Petty Officer.

Gary Voorhis: “We were watching it. We were watching the entire video, just like [Jason] Turner. He was lucky to have a top secret clearance and a friend in a space that he could watch it. It was honestly amazing. This thing moved with no apparent inertial…gravity didn’t seem to affect it. It would stop and go. It never really ramped up in speed. It just went from point A to point B at X speed. Period. And just as erratic as you would even imagine. After we got done watching the video and, you know…a bit stunned. Went out to the smoke deck and kind of stared off into oblivion for a while. I don’t really have any of the psychological effects that Kevin had. But to me, I’ve always been very interested in physics, engineering and this object just showed me a level of physics and a level of engineering that, you know, I didn’t even know is possible. And in that way, it kind of opened me up to a little bit more…so I guess it really kind of did affect me but it was only because I saw something truly impossible happen in front of me. I guess it was a positive thing.”

Dave Beaty spoke about the submarine, USS Louisville, involved in the exercise and that in the official reports, the Captain said there was no sonar contact. Beaty recounted that one time, he was asking Gary Voorhis about this and Voorhis said that he was told there was sonar connect but that it was from, “the other sub?” Wait, what? The other sub? As Beaty noted, there is no record of another sub. 

In these previous conversations with Beaty, Voorhis explained that he could go into CIC since he was a technician but he really didn’t have a need to be in the sonar room unless something was broken. But since some of that equipment needed maintenance at various times, he would find a way to place himself in there so he could hear stuff going on. And that’s how he heard one of the sonar guys mention the contact they had picked up. 

Day joked that Voorhis was hiding behind his console. Voorhis jokingly confessed that sometimes, he was. He explained that the area where the sonar guys sit is a perfect spot in CIC where you can hear everything and nobody can see you. He’s good friends with the all the sonar guys so he used to sit there, wait and just listen. And then one night, they started talking and saying that they had contact. They had an actual contact through those waters.

Beaty asked him if it was his understanding that one of these objects went from 28,000 feet, down to the sea and just kept going? 

Gary Voorhis: “Yeah. It didn’t stop. Now, I will say that is secondhand information given to me directly to me by the sonar technicians. You know, they were like, ‘No, it didn’t stop. They’ve got contacts under water, too.’ And I just..I thought that was absolutely amazing. And then when these guys (Turner, Hughes and Day) are saying, ‘We didn’t know that.’ And I thought that everybody did. Everybody I knew.”

Jason Turner says that the FLIR video we’ve all seen of the Tic Tac is nowhere near the quality of what he saw. What he watched was crystal clear.

Gary Voorhis: “But it is the same video.”

Jason Turner: “It is. It’s the same video. This is actually the very beginning of the full video that I saw – the seven to ten minute long video  – and you see there where he’s switching between different views…when you see the Tic Tac change color. When it was white, that is when you could really see the bottom, the things protruding out the bottom of it. And then, once you see it where it takes off and goes to the left. That is when they started chasing this thing. And then it was making maneuvers that no human being could ever survive. The g-forces that would be put on these people would just…you would die…instantly. And then being in these… you know, the jets, the fighter jets and not being able to keep up with them at all. That’s mind-blowing.”

Bob Kiviat then switched the conversation over to whether or not these objects were ours (part of our government/military) and said that Gary Voorhis gave him a 30% chance that they were. Kiviat asked Jason Turner what he thought about that. 

Turner went on to explain how he was able to watch the Tic Tac video. He had a friend who worked in the Ship’s Signal Exploitation Space, (SSES) which is where all the cryptological techs work. They had some computer issues going on and since he had a top secret clearance, he took some computer parts up there. And the video was playing on one particular console. So he sat down and watched it. That’s the first time he saw it. 

Was it our tech?

Jason Turner: “I mean, if it was from us. You know, why are they even doing this to us?”

Gary Voorhis: “I did have some thoughts about that. There is a chance that it is extremely advanced technology that either we reverse engineered or just actually came up with ourselves. I mean, they would know where our fleet is.”

Jason Turner: “Right.”

Gary Voorhis: “They would know where we’re at. And they’d know we were not armed. Honestly, it would have been the perfect proof of concept. You know, see whether these systems are as viable as they think they are.”

Could they have shot down one of these Tic Tacs? Were any weapons available to these pilots?

PJ Hughes was an Aviation tech (he worked on the E-2 Hawkeyes) and Petty Officer and was on board the USS Nimitz.

PJ Hughes: “The fighters had training that allowed them…they just shoot some lasers at it to kind of paint the target. But they have limited rounds when it comes to the machine guns that are on the fighter. Those were loaded. And there were live munitions on the flight deck that could have gone on rather quickly, if needed.”

Dave Beaty: “And surface to air missiles, I’m sure.”

Gary Voorhis: “Yeah, we had a lot of missiles.”

Kiviat talked about whether or not these objects had taken any aggressive action. Specifically, was the Tic Tac that David Fravor encountered being aggressive when it made a barrel roll right at him.

Kevin Day: “When Commander Fravor made his intercept, we had the control comms in the overhead speaker. And he goes, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! I’m engaged! I’m engaged!’ He was quite shocked.

Day went on to explain that the word “engaged” is a little bit misleading. It doesn’t mean they’re shooting at each other. It just means they’re in a dogfight and that by itself, is not a hostile act. Day said that from his point of view, these objects, whatever they were, were never, ever hostile. In fact, he thinks they just wanted to be left alone.

Kiviat made the point that these objects could have been anywhere. They didn’t need to be be near these aircraft carriers and strike group. He asked if maybe they wanted to be close enough to the exercises so they would be noticed by the strike group? And he asked the guys if they would speculate about that.

Voorhis said he wouldn’t know why they would choose to be there. But if these objects/Tic Tacs had painted them as a target, (that’s something that can be detected), it would have been considered a hostile act. Those craft/objects flying in their airspace was a violation but it was not a “weapons hot” (prepared to fire your weapons/missile) situation. 

Kevin Day added that he never saw the longer version of the video that Jason and Gary said they saw. He said the next morning, he saw the short version with the grainy quality. When he left the Navy, that mpeg video was still in his Navy email but he never moved it to any personal account because that was against the security rules, which he took very seriously. 

Kiviat mentioned 5 or 6 of the best UFO cases he’s looked at and put on TV in one of his specials. He saw the videos, met with NASA and DoD people and then one particular CIA scientist said, “Nah, every UFO case you ever heard about. It’s all explainable. It’s all hoaxes.” Kiviat said government is supposed to work for us and not confuse us. 

He went on to talk about the Chris Mellon fiasco where the names of all the witnesses/pilots (many who want to remain anonymous) were posted on Mellon’s website for the entire world to see. Kiviat says he asked Hal Puthoff where he should go to find out more information about the videos. Puthoff told him to go to Mellon. 

Kiviat mentioned the first name of the female pilot who provided cover for Fravor as he chased the Tic Tac. Most of the folks in the UFO community, thanks to the Mellon fiasco, know her name but we have all refrained from posting it. And that goes for her first name, too. Beaty explained that we know of the name Chad Underwood because Fravor mentioned him on the Fighter Pilot Podcast with host, Vince Aiello. (Joe’s note: Underwood’s plane is the one that took the FLIR video that was released of the Tic Tac)

Kiviat said that the guy who released the names of the witnesses/pilots was sitting in the audience. And somehow, this guy has access to certain documents. I think he’s referring to Buddy aka Alien Protocols. In fact, that’s not true. Twitter user Jay was the one who saw the documents on Mellon’s site and posted them before realizing what he had. He immediately pulled the one that had all the names but by that time, it was too late. Folks who only care about YouTube views and notoriety shared the names with the public. Buddy was one of them.

Kiviat says that he wanted Fravor to be a part of the military panel but he wouldn’t answer his phone calls. 

Gary Voorhis said that if you come across information (like names of servicemen and servicewomen) and you don’t have their permission to share or release it, keep it to yourself. It hurts the other folks when they try to get others to come forward. 5000 people on the carrier. That’s a lot of people who could come forward to verify that this happened. But if people (like Buddy, aka Alien Protocols) keep doing that, who’s gonna want to come forward?

Kevin Day said that as soon as he saw the names had been posted online, he called Lue Elizondo and told him they had a serious problem. And an hour later, it was fixed. 

Voorhis said that the problem is, once the documents make their way onto the Internet, that’s it. They’re out. But I (Joe) can tell you that 99% of the folks in Ufology have been very respectful of the anonymity of those folks and have refrained from using their names or contacting them.

Kiviat brings up the Senate Armed Services Committee…

Kevin Day said, “a couple of months after this story broke, I received an email from one of the Senate staffers – and I won’t say his name because he asked me not to – asking if I could come to DC to talk to him. Well, actually the way he put it, ‘Are you going to be in DC any time soon?’ And I said, ‘Well, I wasn’t really planning on it.’ (Laughs) Apparently, it was sort of a week off and they needed me to come testify.” He added that this whole grassroots effort is about trying to get more witnesses to come forward so they can share what they experienced and be vindicated. Their goal, he said, is to get a bunch of guys together and go to Congress. But one the requirements for them showing up is to have Congress subpoena radar and comm data, “so we have something to talk about when we’re there.”

Kiviat noted that if the broadcast networks and/or media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, etc…) ask the Armed Services Committee about this, they’d probably answer. But none of them have. 

PJ Hughes was finally able to tell his story to the audience.

PJ Hughes: “I’m actually speaking for two people. I’m speaking for myself and for somebody who is in a naval contract due to career choices and does not want to come forward. I never saw (the Tic Tac). The first time I saw it was watching the same thing that you guys have seen. My story involves the radar hard disks that you saw on the [Dave Beaty] video, that record all the flight data. And when that plane came back that was airborne during Fravor’s intercept, you know, I take all that stuff out of the airplane, walk down inside the skin of the ship, to my shop, and we lock them up in our safe. And pretty much, no sooner than I had done that, comes my commanding officer, with a couple of Air Force guys…knocks on my door. Tells me, ‘I want the stuff off that flight.’ We get back into our safe and I sign it out to him because he won’t give me anyone else to sign it out to. He takes them and leaves and that’s the last time I ever saw them.

“As far as Roger, he was an In Flight Technician. There’s an enlisted program that the squad can have to send basically an enlisted guy flying, if something broke, to fix it because not everything can be fixed on the ground. He was in that flight, flying in the radar seat. They’re flying…up comes the Tic Tac and kind of forms up on them. It stayed there for a minute or so and just kind of takes off. When we got back, I was not aware of this at the time, but he and the rest of the crew were actually taken down to a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility). Basically a room where you can’t hear anything. You’re behind a locked door.

“They signed NDAs – Non-Disclosure Agreements, saying they wouldn’t talk about anything. Shortly thereafter and after the Commanding Officer had come to take the [radar hard discs] from us, Roger returned to our work center and…he’s not himself. He’s normally a very happy guy, especially when he gets to go flying because he loves to fly. He’s definitely not himself. He’s kind of a little edgy. He starts telling us what happened. But before we get too far into the story, our division chief comes through the door and basically says, ‘Shut your mouth. Don’t talk about it. Drop the discussion.’ And that was it until about fourteen years later when I happened to run across Dave’s video.”

PJ had contacted Dave Beaty after watching “The Nimitz Encounters” and told him his story. And then introduced him to that friend, Roger, who was aboard the Hawkeye. Roger, via email, told Beaty that he could only tell him the basics of what happened to him (including seeing the Tic Tac with is own eyeballs) because he signed a document. He thanked him for making “The Nimitz Encounters” because he was honestly starting to think that the incident had never happened because that’s what they told him.

Beaty noted that this is the first time anyone has said they were told to never talk about this event and that they had to sign an NDA. Up until that point, everybody said that they were allowed to talk about everything. And some even went as far to say that if anybody says they were told not to talk about this, they’re full of it.

Voorhis shared that his captain had started a rumor that the objects were spontaneously forming ice in the atmosphere. He said he and his buddies would all sit there, smoke and say, “Yeah, right.”

Beaty went on to talk about what he was told regarding what was on the hard drives that were confiscated. It contained the CEC (Combined Engagement Capabilities) data, which “has the most sophisticated, combined information of these Tic Tacs. Wow that must be some high resolution…It’s there. From every vessel, plane in the strike group.”

He then recounted how he asked Gary if anybody ever came for his data recordings. 

Gary Voorhis: “Yeah. They came aboard. It wasn’t too much longer than after we watched the video. And a lot of people say, ‘How could they have gotten there so fast?’ But what you forget is that we were tracking these things for over a week until we did the intercept.”

 Voorhis added that he was told that if anything was left, he should erase it. 

Hughes said he was open to this being our technology due his experience of working on very advanced tech that the public is totally unaware of. But he’s also not against it being otherworldly. He added, “I just wanna know what it is.”

Kevin Day went on to talk about certain folks, who he wouldn’t name, that he now has on his side and how he believes this is all heading to Congress. He also described some of the post-effects he experienced after the encounter.  

Kiviat referenced the certain faction in the Pentagon who feel this subject is demonic and should be avoided. As someone in the audience later pointed out, this is the same thing that happened with the remote viewing program. As Kiviat kept talking about this, Voorhis steered the conversion back to the Tic Tac and what they experienced. 

Day brought up Skinwalker Ranch and Kiviat used that to share his opinion that there’s no hard evidence to prove anything paranormal has happened there. He also said that he couldn’t understand why paranormal events at Skinwalker were being connected to events like the Tic Tac. I could have told him: Besides all the weird stuff that has been reported there, such as Bigfoot sightings and encounters with various creatures, there have also been plenty of UFO sightings that have been reported at the ranch and in the Uinta Basin. Also, humans have reported being affected by these various phenomena, at or near the ranch. Kevin Day went on to say this. And according to George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell, Skinwalker is the reason the AAWSAP program began.

Voorhis again brought the conversation back to the Tic Tac event and what happened to the guys on the stage. 

Beaty shared an audio clip from a new witness, Omar, who was onboard the Nimitz and who says he had another sighting at night, after a man had fallen overboard. And there were 30-50 other witnesses. 

There’s a lot more that was discussed, including how the guys felt once the video was publicized by To The Stars and the New York Times, when they published their article in 2017.

This guys have opinions on whose technology this was but they admit that none of them know. And they want the truth, whatever that turns out to be. The data was taken from them. Somewhere, somebody has it. They want to know why that data was confiscated and what those objects were.

I’m grateful that these guys came forward to share their stories. To me, they’re heroes on many fronts.

If you’d like to read more about these guys, check out these two blog articles I posted. One was written by Dave Beaty. They can be read here and here. A lot of this may not have happened if Beaty hadn’t made “The Nimitz Encounters.” A huge thank you to him.

© Joe Murgia and www.ufojoe.net, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Joe Murgia and www.ufojoe.net with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

Elizondo, gary voorhis, jason turner, kevin day, megacon, military, Nimitz, pj hughes, Princeton, sonar, tic tac, To The Stars, TTSA, uap, ufo, ufo megacon

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