F.O.I.A. documents recently revealed this incident occurred more than 2 years ago. I considered whether to post this incident in the existing Mysterious swarms of giant drones have started to appear in the Colorado and Nebraska night sky, and nobody knows where they're coming from thread, because both of these incidents occurred around the same time frame, but as they occurred great distances apart and this incident directly affected U.S. military assets I thought a separate thread was appropriate.

[Note: multiple hyperlinks found at linked website article.]

Emphasis added in bold.
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UFO's or Drones: What Is 'Swarming' U.S. Navy Warships?

March 25, 2021

by Stephen Silver

The drones purportedly appeared at a time when few civilian ships were nearby, so it’s unclear exactly where they came from. It’s also unclear who would have access to drones that could stay in the air for as long as ninety minutes.

The Navy, Coast Guard and FBI have pursued a “high-level investigation” into a series of incidents that took place around California’s Channel Islands in the summer of 2019, when, as according to a story published by The War Zone, “groups of unidentified aircraft . . . pursued that service’s vessels.”

The incident, which took place miles off the California coast, entailed as many as six aircraft “swarming” the ships over the course of two nights, even in low-visibility conditions. It was first reported last year, when filmmaker Dave Beaty, who is also a UFO researcher, took notice of incidents involving the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Kidd.

The War Zone reporters Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti have obtained new documents, via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, including the deck logs from the relevant time, as well as automatic identification system ship location data.

It has been determined that the 2019 events affected not only the USS Kidd, but also the USS Rafael Peralta, USS Russell, USS John Finn, and the USS Paul Hamilton.

Findings show that the incidents began on July 14, with the sighting of a pair of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, that were spotted by the Kidd. It notified Rafael Peralta and John Finn, which also reported such activity. The Peralta later noticed “a white light hovering over the ship's flight deck.”

“The log reflects that the drone managed to match the destroyer's speed with the craft moving at 16 knots in order to maintain a hovering position over the ship’s helicopter landing pad. To further complicate what was already a complex maneuver, the drone was operating in low visibility conditions (less than a nautical mile) and at night,” the report said.

The incidents caused the ships to activate its Ship Nautical Or Otherwise Photographic Interpretation and Exploitation team, also known as its “SNOOPIE team.”

The drones purportedly appeared at a time when few civilian ships were nearby, so it’s unclear exactly where they came from. It’s also unclear who would have access to drones that could stay in the air for as long as ninety minutes.

The War Zone also reported on a set of “major incursions” that took place the following night, July 15. The Rafael Peralta reported the drones first, with the Kidd and other ships following.

The logs included references to “drones dropping in elevation, and apparently moving forward and backward, left and right” as well as a call from a passing cruise ship letting the Rafael Peralta know that the drones weren’t theirs.

A government investigation soon began, with the NCIS and FBI both taking part. It was thought for a while that the drones had come from a ship called the ORV Alguita, but the owners of the ship stated that the drones they had on board couldn’t have traveled very far, and wasn’t close to the ships in question at the time.

The last of the emails included in the FOIA was in late July of 2019, so it’s not known what the Navy and the other investigators determined about the origin of the drones. No results of the investigation were ever announced publicly.

But then, there were further reports of drones on July 25 and 30th of that year.

“At the time of writing, we do not have complete deck logs for the month of July except for USS Kidd, so it remains uncertain if other ships also continued to have drone encounters later in the month,” according to Kehoe and Cecotti.

“It is unclear why anyone would operate drones near Navy warships in such a brazen manner,” the two reporters said. “Commercially available drones are not commonly capable of flying for such long durations across great distances with speeds in excess of 45 miles an hour. Based on the pooled data available from the deck logs, we estimate the drones traversed at least 100 nautical miles in the July 14th incident.”

This raises many questions: Who has that many drones, and can coordinate them simultaneously, much less near warships? Was it a foreign government? Or something related to a classified program, as speculated by The War Zone, which may be tested at San Clemente Island? And why the secrecy, and no official report about the incidents?

“If the drones were not operated by the American military, these incidents represent a highly significant security breach,” the reporters noted. “If they were part of some kind of covert action, it is nonetheless unclear why they were flown so openly and so frequently in almost a harassing manner. More troubling still, if a foreign state actor was involved, where exactly were the drones launched from?”

Of course, there’s one another possibility.

The War Zone does not use the acronym“UFO,” but some of the media coverage based on it has used it. The New York Post went with the headline “UFOs Harassed US Warships Off California.” The Daily Mail went with “Swarms of flashing ‘Tic-Tac shaped’ UFOs chased four US Navy destroyers off California coast at 45 mph and hovered above them at night for WEEKS.”

Beaty, the filmmaker who came forward about the incidents back in 2019, quoted a Navy veteran on the USS Kidd who said that “I know he said he could see them with the naked eye and they were almost eye level with the bridge hovering. They were the same tic-tac-shaped objects.”

The Pentagon is reportedly getting ready to issue a new report about UFOs, the Trump-era director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe said this week in a Fox News interview.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for the National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver. Image: Reuters

Suggestion: Shoot. One. Down.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
Suggestion: Shoot. One. Down.

According to this article, they did try to shoot them down, but they were too small and fast moving.

https://www.unexplained-myster...ssed-by-drone-swarms

Ok! So... No one aboard a US Naval Vessel has... A rifle? Or a shotgun? If my reading of the articles is correct, at one point one of the drones was hovering above the Helo Deck. Sounds like within small arms range, maybe? I realize I am quite ignorant of the operations capability of our Navy, but the idea they were helpless to act in this situation is incomprehensible to me.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must Be the truth.
Ask yourself; what was obtained? Who benefits? Has the capability?

IMO: The safest bet is Chinese. Perhaps to gather intel on our digital/radio/physical responses to threats, so that their weapons can be prepared.

Or maybe they are the weapon being tested. Imagine 10,000 tiny drones able to evade defenses and pile up on a key part of a target, and then detonate all of the small amounts of explosives at once.

quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:
IMO: The safest bet is Chinese. Perhaps to gather intel on our digital/radio/physical responses to threats, so that their weapons can be prepared.

Or maybe they are the weapon being tested. Imagine 10,000 tiny drones able to evade defenses and pile up on a key part of a target, and then detonate all of the small amounts of explosives at once.

Exactly it has to be Chinese. Consider this drone with a range of almost 2500 miles…

https://interestingengineering...ys-at-enemy-warships

That could be launched out of radar range and then deploying several smaller drones when closer to the target…

They were too fast and small and evaded sea-wiz? Sure, that's believable.

If only these destroyers had the ability to monitor radio frquencies and jam signals.

quote:

Originally posted by Graniteguy:
They were too fast and small and evaded sea-wiz? Sure, that's believable.

Well some of the craft that has been caught on radar in the last two years off our coasts has been verified to go from a couple hundred feet to 80,000 feet in under 3 seconds so it’s not hard to figure out who ever it is might have other craft with capabilities far beyond our own.

Lets see.. who makes most of the drones in the world? Hmmm.

Look at recreational/commercial drones in general. Many people feel the Chinese download everything they film. That may be a bit much, but picking and choosing what they want perhaps. Look at it like social media. Years ago people said "one day the government and corporations will have giant computers and collect information about everyone." The reply was "yeah but how are they going to get it?" The answer turned out to be the generally public would give it to them willingly on things like Facebook and others.

You can look at consumer drones the same way. "We're going to map and photograph other countries in detail." How are we going to to that? "They're going to do it for us."

(tinfoil drone pilots cap. They must be really disappointed in the things I film)

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
Suggestion: Shoot. One. Down.


Ok! So... No one aboard a US Naval Vessel has... A rifle? Or a shotgun?

Even on the CG cutters I was on and later while being the ships servicing armory, all of the units had shotguns. Many many units had “morale” guns that personnel could check out for hunting, skeet, etc…besides the standard Remington 870 (currently with a 14” barrel) riot shotguns, there was browning A5 s and Remington copies along with one unit having a savage semi auto shotgun IIRC.

I find it hard to believe that no one tried to shoot one down.

The drone swarm attack in Angel Has Fallen is seeming more and more plausible

quote:

from a couple hundred feet to 80,000 feet in under 3 seconds so it’s not hard to figure out who ever it is might have other craft with capabilities far beyond our own.

That's over 4 miles per second. Certainly would have to be technology foreign to humankind.

Easily transported in chinese container vessels and delivered to a port near you. The chinese have practiced maneuvers near Taiwan using commercial vessels converted for military operations.

The fact that the Navy couldn't find a way to knock at least one of these things out of the sky is disconcerting.

Ships defenses? Small arms? Something?

No, we'll just observe and report.

(Now they may have, and if they did it's probably not going to get mentioned, but to release a story saying we didn't do shit is not a good look).

And yes, it was China. They are going to clean our clock in the future. It's going to be bad.

There have been several reports in the last couple of years of a man flying a jetpack over/near LAX airport. I remember one report was by an American Airlines pilot, other pilots too, and one was flying at an altitude of 3,000 feet, and I seem to recall one flying quite a bit higher.

Why? My money is on the chinese doing dry runs.

Here is a link to one such story. Click to see the pic in the story



‘The Jetpack Guy Is Back’: Los Angeles Sighting Draws an Inquiry, Again
Federal aviation officials said they, along with the F.B.I., were investigating the report of a person in a jetpack flying over Los Angeles.



Last December, a flight instructor shot video of an object flying at about 3,000 feet near Los Angeles. Aviation officials have received several reports in the last year of someone using a jetpack.Credit...Brandy Fogelman/Sling Pilot Academy
By Maria Cramer
July 30, 2021
A pilot flying a Boeing 747 on Wednesday night looked toward the right wing of the plane and reported a strange figure zooming over Los Angeles.

“Possible jetpack man in sight,” the pilot said, sounding weary, if not outright annoyed.

It was unclear if the object spotted Wednesday was the same “jetpack man” that American Airlines pilots said they saw last year, flying at 3,000 feet around Los Angeles International Airport, or the reported jetpack user seen six weeks later by crew members on another commercial flight.

But the sighting this week was enough to draw warnings from aviation officials and another inquiry by federal investigators, who have now looked into several reports of someone in a jetpack flying around Los Angeles.

Federal officials who have investigated the sightings said they have not been able to confirm that a person in a jetpack actually flew into controlled air space.


This week, however, air traffic controllers who warned other pilots in the vicinity appeared to believe that the mystery flyer had returned.

“Use caution,” an air traffic controller said. “The jetpack guy is back.”

This time the sighting was made at 5,000 feet, 15 miles east of the airport at about 6:12 p.m., according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency said the airline involved was Kalitta Air, a cargo carrier.

Air traffic controllers and pilots discussing Wednesday’s sighting sounded somewhat exasperated, according to an audio recording of their exchanges posted on LiveATC.net, which shares live and archived recordings of air-traffic-control radio transmissions.

“We’re looking for the Iron Man,” a pilot said after air traffic controllers broadcast the sighting.

The F.A.A. and the F.B.I. investigate every potential jetpack sighting report, they said.

“The F.B.I. will work with the F.A.A. as we have in the past to investigate the most recent report,” said Laura Eimiller, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. “We’ve worked with the F.A.A. on each of the past sightings and thus far, we have not been able to validate any of the reports.”

In a statement, the F.A.A. said that no unusual objects were spotted by radar on Wednesday night.

The incident in August 2020 occurred at about 6:35 p.m., when the pilot of American Airlines Flight 1997 from Philadelphia reported, “We just passed a guy in a jetpack.” Another sighting, last October, was reported to have occurred at an altitude of 6,000 feet, when a China Airlines crew called it in at about 1:45 p.m. roughly seven miles northwest of the airport.

But some of the companies that make jetpacks have expressed skepticism that what pilots have seen in the air is a person, and not a large drone.

Most jetpacks lack the fuel efficiency to fly for more than a few minutes, which makes it difficult for them to get very high.

The packs are largely used as tourist attractions for thrill seekers who want to experience a few minutes of flight, typically over open fields or water.

In recent years, the F.A.A. has enacted rules and restrictions around objects flying close to airports, as the number of aerial vehicles, primarily drones, has increased around airports. The F.A.A. requires authorization to fly in controlled airspace.

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quote:

Why? My money is on the chinese doing dry runs.

Mbinky reads this and agrees.

<Pops Red Dawn into the VCR and checks the oil in the Jeep...>

I don’t know mbinky. I don’t think the only country to use nuclear weapons in anger would go down without one hell of a fight.

Unless those drones can think for themselves they have vulnerabilities. Wars have been won because of the ability to communicate with your assets without your enemy intercepting and decoding your communications.

If the Navy had been able to down one of those drones and IF it was from a foreign actor you would never see it reported. You would probably see articles that say we were unable to shoot one down.

^^^^^ Quantity has a Quality all it's own. (generally attributed to Vladimir Lenin)
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