Fmr AARO Dir. Tim Philips on the Nimitz UFO case: "They actually sent people to the Princeton to get recordings"

Former acting director of the Pentagon UAP study program gave 2 interviews. Sentinel News selected the best excerpts.

Jun 19, 2025

This article is a selection of quotes coming from 2 interviews, by That UFO Podcast (TUP) and Mick West (MW)

Highlights

MW 27:18 2004 Nimitz Tic Tac Case

Third Fleet had a flag plot. They were on board. They understood that there were some unusual things being detected by the spy one radar on the Princeton. And they actually directed that the radar tapes be preserved. They actually sent people to the Princeton to get recordings of what the Princeton had detected. We do know that that data made it back to Third Fleet headquarters in San Diego. They did not have the technical ability to exploit that. So they had to go to Dahlgren, Virginia is where the lab was. So we know it physically went back to Dahlgren.

Working with the Navy and the out now staff, we did two physical searches trying to find that data. We could not find that data. It was somewhat of a challenge, that happened 20 years before. Another thing that was curious, not sure if it was intentional or just incompetence, but the flight journals, the logs, the operational, journals that are maintained by warships, that normally goes into the archives. And we went back trying to find the records of what happened during that workup so we could attempt to correlate some of the witness statements. We could not find those journals. And we could not find them, the Navy could not find them. And that's in a report that will eventually become public.

We also found out it was very, very curious how this happened, but one of our officers on the AARO staff was at a cocktail party in Old Town, Alexandria, and ran into the former director of DARPA. And they started talking about working at AARO and he had mentioned that he had been out there during that Nimitz workup and DARPA was working with the Navy. Not everybody was vetted, but they had a new lightweight ISR system that that battle group was gonna use during its deployment. There was a report from a Navy chief who had worked in the combat information center on the Princeton CIC that reported about this mysterious helicopter with people dressed in black who had gone out to the Princeton and gone into the captain's state room, which is very unusual on a warship underway and then departed with a bunch of materials.

MW 30:38 DARPA

So we were unable to find that journal to be able to validate that claim. But we did look into the nature, I believe it was a WASP, was the ISR system and it's come out, it's public now, but I believe the Princeton may have detected that with its center, its spy one radar, we do not believe the F-18s at high altitude would have been able to detect it due to the clutter and the fact that it operated right at the wave tops. But a lot of the reports that occurred out there, and we believe them, are we ever going to have the data to understand what happened? Not after 20 years.

MW 41:32 SAP Programs and elected officials

The reason that members of the UAP caucus were not read into the SAP programs was because their leadership denied it. AARO requested it, the SAPCO, the DOD SAPCO requested it. And those requests were turned down by their own leadership, they felt they did not have a need to know.

TUP 51:23 Black Triangle images

The concern about the black triangle, and I did want to clear some, I haven't personally seen one, okay, I know it said, I see why, I haven't, I've read the reports, we've interviewed very, very critical force protection officers who have, there are some images

TUP 1:02:35 Flight charactersitics

There were flight characteristics that we didn't quite understand. Theoretically, it's possible. Were we aware of a fielded system that could operate in that matter? The answer is no

TUP 1:26:30 Disclosure

The fact that they're aliens is not something that we would classify, now as a senior executive in the U.S. government, if we were to have made such an assessment, that would be communicated to the president, to the executive branch of government and that's something that they would share with American public. Probably not AARO, kind of above our pay grade and we would inform congress and we would allow those you know elected officials decide how they communicated that with the American public.

Transcript MW

MW 6:24

It’s going to be in the 2025 Defense Authorization Act, they're actually going to mandate, it's going to be part of the law that AARO will be a “must coordinate office” when it comes to counter UAS, operation, activities and solutions. So AARO is part of that community often, when we detect something that shouldn't be there, often we resolve that as a UAS. Well if we detect that, we need to pass that to that commander that they have an issue at their location, AARO is not the UAS place, we're looking for UAPs.

MW 8:21

Didn't seem to be any stigma in reporting of UAS and what the public called drones, and it seems to be episodic. So you saw a lot of reporting up in New England, New Jersey, New York City area, and a lot of that was resolved as authorized activity of UAS actually flying at night, or the misidentification of commercial air traffic seen by civilians that looked up and realized there was something in the sky. One of my last trips to the UK, I received a very, very good brief from them as they analyzed UAS incidents that occurred a lot of the bases. They joined US-UK bases, and they saw something very, very similar. But we do have a proliferation of UASs that fly in our space, sometimes lawfully, sometimes not. ARRO actually has done some pattern-of-life surveillance operations where we've been asked to put our Gremlin system in place at various DOD installations and do up to a year-long surveillance operation, trying to understand what is normal and what is the baseline. And in doing so, we've actually detected UASs, flying in restricted air spaces in violation of local regulations. So we have done that. We've actually worked quite closely with the Northern Command. The sensors that we have tend to be a little bit higher fidelity. Most of your counter UAS systems tend to be point defense. We tend to be looking at hundreds of square miles, if not thousands of square miles, trying to detect a phenomena that we don't quite understand. If we pick up UAS, we kind of understand that.

MW 17:56

there's probably around 40 cases where there's phenomena that has been detected, various means, you know, it could be observation of, you know, a security personnel, it could be a sensor, an active radar, or a passive system that has detected something that we don't understand. Right. That is a true anomaly that we were in law, tasked to do is to solve these really hard problems. And they're very, very rare, they don't occur. . But the fact that they've been detected at very sensitive places, elicited a response

MW 27:18

I know that the Navy had completed their investigation and shared it with AARO, hasn't gone public yet. We continue to investigate that case. The challenge we had, that happened back in 2004. And that was before there was guidance from the Department of Defense to the operational forces to report and retain data. However, at the time of the Nimitz workout, so the Nimitz was in an exercise and they were being assessed for their readiness to deploy to the Gulf during the Operation Iraqi Freedom, I believe it was. Third Fleet had a flag plot. They were on board. They understood that there were some unusual things being detected by the spy one radar on the Princeton. And they actually directed that the radar tapes be preserved. They actually sent people to the Princeton to get recordings of what the Princeton had detected. We do know that that data made it back to Third Fleet headquarters in San Diego. They did not have the technical ability to exploit that. So they had to go to Dahlgren, Virginia is where the lab was. So we know it physically went back to Dahlgren. Working with the Navy and the out now staff, we did two physical searches trying to find that data. We could not find that data. It was somewhat of a challenge, that happened 20 years before. Another thing that was curious, not sure if it was intentional or just incompetence, but the flight journals, the logs, the operational, journals that are maintained by warships, that normally goes into the archives. And we went back trying to find the records of what happened during that workup so we could attempt to correlate some of the witness statements. We could not find those journals. And we could not find them, the Navy could not find them. And that's in a report that will eventually become public. We also found out it was very, very curious how this happened, but one of our officers on the AARO staff was at a cocktail party in Old Town, Alexandria, and ran into the former director of DARPA. And they started talking about working at AARO and he had mentioned that he had been out there during that Nimitz workup and DARPA was working with the Navy. Not everybody was vetted, but they had a new lightweight ISR system that that battle group was gonna use during its deployment. There was a report from a Navy chief who had worked in the combat information center on the Princeton CIC that reported about this mysterious helicopter with people dressed in black who had gone out to the Princeton and gone into the captain's state room, which is very unusual on a warship underway and then departed with a bunch of materials.

MW 30:38

We found out and we actually talked to this executive from DARPA that was actually them, it was actually DARPA personnel that actually had gone out there and some of them were wearing, you know, dark black jumpsuits. And that's what the crew observed according to the testimony that we received. And then what we were trying to do is get the operational, the flight journal, the log of who landed at when, the tail number of the aircraft so we could validate that report that we had received from the witness. So we were unable to find that journal to be able to validate that claim. But we did look into the nature, I believe it was a WASP, was the ISR system and it's come out, it's public now, but I believe the Princeton may have detected that with its center, its spy one radar, we do not believe the F-18s at high altitude would have been able to detect it due to the clutter and the fact that it operated right at the wave tops. But a lot of the reports that occurred out there, and we believe them, are we ever going to have the data to understand what happened? Not after 20 years.

MW 33:43

We were embarrassed at what happened at Langley and AARO was asked to come in and try to reconstruct the radar tracks. There was a lot of equipment and kit that was rapidly sent to Langley to try to understand during that 10-day period where we had UAS both fixed wing and rotor wing operate unimpeded for a long period of time at a national site.

MW 34:45

And we saw where we had sensors, one night had actually detected a UAP incident, or a UAS incident, and then the next day they recorded over that same media. So we worked very, very closely with Lincoln Labs, who, with the British, helped invent tactical radars, you know, trying to rebuild radar tracks so we could give that to the law enforcement task force so they knew where to begin their investigations and start knocking on doors on where these, you know, UASs, you know, started, you know, where the ingress and where the egress, you know, what was their interest Langley.

MW 41:32

MW 42:56

I was frustrated by some of the claims made by witnesses to members of Congress. I know that we had people refer to us, one particular individual. We thought he was extorting us, you know, we were going to pay him for his knowledge or his materials, or he was going to take it to a foreign country. It sounded like extortion to us and we reported it to our FBI counterparts.

MW 43:42

I actually went back to this member’s staff saying they should protect the member from this individual. It wasn't fair to him to give him an audience. I am not a medical professional, but what I heard based of common sense, I wouldn't want him around my family.

MW 44:23

We were asked to interview and we did. And there was concern that some of the materials that he possessed could compromise actual programs of record. When I actually met with the chairman over this issue, he had asked me if I had been, actually, visited to the Nevada test site. And I had personal knowledge of some of the technologies that were being tested out there. And I told him, no, I haven't. And he highly recommended that I get out there, you know, get read in and understand what was going on because he was afraid that no programs could have been compromised. So that's one reason I went out to the Nevada test site.

MW 45:18

To go out there to meet with the commanders, to look at the test articles. And you have a much better understanding why rational people who are not reading to the technology could actually think that this was derived or reverse engineered from, you know, an alien, you know, ET type entity.

MW 46:10

These people that report what they saw, when we go back and we see the video tapes of the test, their accuracy is just amazing. It actually is scary. It is how they accurately convey what they saw to us. And we look at it and we understand what it is. We do understand the technology and they're right. It's amazing. But it came, it was invented by us and flown by us. And we want to preserve the security of these programs. And that's where we go through such great lanes to vet people and have such compartmentalization. And we test in such a remote place in order to protect these systems as they're being developed.

MW 47:14

It's not what you'd expect from any type of aircraft you've seen before.

MW 48:08

You probably have seen the comments about the alien eggs, the metal spheres, whether they actually do drop a lot of very, very precise metal spheres from altitude, and they use them to calibrate their sensors. So if you're out there on the range and you see things gliding, often it's these, you know, some very large metal balls. They use them to test the sensors. They understand the characteristics of them very, very well. They're precision. They're very milled with precision, so they understand what the radar cross-section is, and they drop them to calibrate before a test. These things are dropped and they're tracked to ensure that our sensors are calibrated correctly throughout the range. And I've seen some stories about alien eggs, and those are test objects that we use to calibrate.

MW 59:57

I thought we had analysis and a solution that was going to go public. I haven't been to the website to see it's been published. A lot of those cases are going back. I think the gimbal was off the Virginia Capes incident. Again, we're looking at incomplete data, again, because the Department of Defense, in this case the Navy, did not have operational direction to preserve that data. It's on the initiative of the aviators that captured it, but the data bricks that come off the aircraft, when they download it during their mission debriefs, now we would get that data. Back then, that data was being uploaded in an email or put on the internet, so we don't have the original data to go back and analyze. I'm a little bit frustrated. I know those were part of the canon of the UAP gospel, but we wanted to look at current cases, national security cases that present a threat today.

MW 1:10:20

I know that AARO actually had worked with a studio in California. There was some 70 and 30 millimeter video, or not video, it was actually filmed. I think it was an Atlas missile test that occurred at / Vandenberg missile test range out there and we were able to go back and reconstruct the [...] film to actually provide a video clip of what was being tested. So there was claims that an alien spaceship had interfered and destroyed a missile that was being tested out there at Vandenberg. Actually in fact it was a countermeasure test being done by our scientists and we were able to get the original films and reports of that. I think that's going to be in the next version of the AARO [...]. There was some work done with the national labs dealing with the cascading transformer failure. One of the missile ranges that was another, you know, one of the base, you know, baseline stories about alien involvement and weapons and I think they have some stories on that. There could be some new, you know, new data, new facts about the Nimitz case that AARO was able to research and confirm and will publish. So I'm sure that AARO is working very, very hard to get that out, you know, to both Congress and the American public.

MW 1:12:44

What I'm privy to is the fact that the missile silos were actually connected to the commercial grid for power. They did have their critical power. They had their own generators, but for cost savings, they were connected to the commercial grid. They had dual fire feeds. There was an electrical disturbance, there was some storms, and the filtering, the capacitors that would have shielded the critical systems and the missile silos from a energy surge coming through the commercial grid failed and actually took some of the missile silos down. That would have been very, very embarrassing to the Department of Defense, and it was a vulnerability of our nuclear deterrent. I do know that the Air Force spent a lot of money working with national labs trying to duplicate the failure so they could understand it and re-engineer a solution. That was the work that AARO had discovered in the archives and actually got all the test results. The EMP is something I'm not aware of. I did read it in the press. That's not the story that AARO was pursuing when I was still there.

MW 1:30:00

I'm a great believer that the US government does not have a monopoly on understanding of this phenomenon. I think there's some very, very capable people out there. You and what you've done with the tools that you've filled can help us understand. And I know that the current director had actually had research maybe trying to do a UAP challenge where we could have a non-classify, where we can get data, put it out there.

MW 1:31:15

I remember, I think it was SCU, forwarded some PhD dissertations where people had gone back into the archives and done some data mining on government data on UFOs historically and had come up with some patterns of life and some findings that we thought that was excellent tradecraft.

MW 1:34:14

We work very, very closely with a lot of state level, you know, academic or universities to help us analyze the data. And I think there's more that we could do and share and partner with state and local tribal to get a better understanding and more timely response so we can understand UAPs. You know, I believe that this is a security incident. I also believe that where I never saw anything supernatural, you know, there could be another dimension that if that could exist out there that physics, as we know it, can explain the activity. We never witnessed it. We didn't measure it. But we do know there's a small percentage of cases that we can't explain.

MW 1:35:19

I think there will be more discoveries as we start operating in space, you know, they are the a all-domain anomaly resolution office. And as you know, we have a lot of space surveillance data. We actually had worked with the community to define AARO's role and define UAP in space. And wouldn't it be great if we could detect an anomaly as it de-orbited, come into the atmosphere, build a track and watch where it goes.

MW 1:36:03

Actually, we do have some uncorrelated tracks that have been deemed not to be a threat. We have things in space faults. We have different databases that we track everything in space and paint chips to space craft.

MW 1:36:29

If the Department of Defense deems something not to be a threat, their analysis stops at that point. Well, maybe there's cases there, maybe there's anomalies that AARO could research and work with the academic and the S&T community to understand what these are. And I think that's where a lot of the cooperation, you know, working with the Department of Commerce, working with international partners, could bring some horsepower and capability to look at this. I think that AARO needs to leverage all data, all analytic capabilities.

Transcript TUP

TUP 4:37

This was a legitimate attempt by the U.S. government to understand this UFO, UAP phenomenon. It had been going on for seventy years. Really, even before World War II, a lot of speculation, a lot of attempts by different departments of the government, Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force in particular, they had different attempts trying to understand the phenomena as it really caught on in the press.

TUP 5:14

As the U.S. military started to install and operate, digitally scanning radars and aircraft that had much better fidelity and sensitivity than prior fighter attack aircraft had, they started to detect things which were always there. But now they were aware of it. There was a lot of speculation about what was being detected. There were a lot of claims made sometimes under oath to members of Congress. There was a lot of video that was improperly leaked to the public without authority by various members of the Department of Defense trying to get the truth out there.

TUP 7:48

Our scope of what we were attempting to do is we were concerned primarily with unidentified unknown objects operate in proximity to critical infrastructure or operational department of defense organizations. That was our sweet spot. That was our real concern.

TUP 9:09

Another thing that was unique about it is in the law, they gave AARO the authority to access information at any classification level as it was related to the subject of UAPs. There was nothing that was off limits.

TUP 9:58

In fact, there was one, whatever a three letter agency was trying to protect one of their crown jewels. And there was reluctance of that agency to provide images to AARO. AARO wanted to include them in a report to Congress congressional oversight because it really explained how some of these advanced technologies could be mistaken as something from another world.

TUP 10:48

When the deputy secretary of defense found out that there was not immediate cooperation, she had her military aid call that director and basically tell them, give Tim what he needs. And I have never seen anything like that in my military and intelligence community that given us what we needed to understand, as you know, there's special access programs and controlled access programs. These are mechanisms that the department of the defense and the intelligence community use to compartmentalize and to preserve and protect very, very sensitive program.

TUP 14:59

And one of the challenges we had, when there would be an incident, the first thing we would have to do is speculate, go out and research whether there are any blue programs that could account for that incident. So was somebody flying or testing some new technology that could have been interpreted or misidentified as a UAP incident? It was a UAP to them, but is there somebody in the government understand what occurred? And that is very difficult to do because we do protect secrets, technology based on the need to know, we compartmentalize. So you have to be very, very judicious in who you ask in the question that's asked. Because there are not going to volunteer information.

TUP 15:55

But as we were able to build trust with them, now the fact that we would protect, their sensitive programs before we published, we would actually have them go back and review it because we're not aware of everything that they're attempting to protect.

TUP 16:37

The same time, there were sensitivities about where we were operating, the type of aircraft or the sensor that detected the UAP that we wanted to protect. In some cases, that information was so sensitive. It was at the SAP and CAP level that we would have to go to the leadership of Congress. We would brief them, but we'd be unable to brief everybody in the committee because they weren't read into those programs. So we would normally have reports at various classification and access levels to protect those national secrets. Now, one of the things that AARO did do is the fact that there was something we didn't understand or UAP, that in fact, that itself was not classified. Where the incident occurred could be very, very sensitive.

TUP 19:57

we don't have original classification authority for UAP information. That would go to the organization, the entity that made that detection. They're the ones who initially classified that. Most of it's derivative classification based off a guide. So if we didn't classify it, we can't declassify it.

TUP 22:42

The executive branch and the president himself and their number of high-ranking cabinet officials who are original classification authorities can release information on the authority.

TUP 24:06

Our government, when they think it's in their best interest, can move very, very fast. Okay. AARO doesn't have that authority.

TUP 26:28

when we had a case, we pursued it with two tracks. So we had the scientists and the labs that supported them. And then we had the Intel analysts and we had a very senior Intel analyst from Langley who was our director of analysis who would independently look at the available information of a case and come up with their assessment of what they thought would happen. They would have a reconciliation conference to determine if they agreed or not. 80% of the time we did, but they used it on different tracks. One issue is the basic, what we had, in sensors used scientific principles and capabilities and the Intel communities that those analysts, they used their trade craft to try to understand an incident. There were times where we didn't agree, we'd have to go back and pursue a case. Some of the cases we just could not agree on and we never could with any degree of confidence solve those cases

TUP 29:33

So I actively looked for special interest groups that had the knowledge and invested time, their expertise, and money to understand this phenomenon. There were groups I thought that did excellent academic peer review science on some of these cases. Matter of fact, some of their tools we adopted. The idea for a mobile on ISR sensor platform actually came from a group of scientists who were working out in Long Island, New York, where they had a RV that they fitted with sensors and recording devices you're looking out there, Long Island South. AARO had a system called the Gremlin, which took 40-foot maritime containers, shipping containers to move around on heavy lift to get somewhere. And the idea of having an agile, very responsive mobile platform with those types of sensors on board that we could drive to a site relatively quickly to begin the investigation of the UAP incident. Kind of stole that from the scientists in New York. I thought we read their book. We thought it was a great plan. We actually looked at the sensors in that book. There was a list of sensors they use. We kind of compared it to a lot of the DOD and IC equipment that we had procured. And it's gotten to the point now where AARO has actually developed a rapid reaction capability where we can respond quickly. There'd be an incident within hours, within a day. We can get AARO military personnel or they could get their scientists on a plane with some handheld multispectral equipment and imaging equipment to try to help the force protection folks, security folks understand what had occurred.

TUP 35:40

There's oversight, and AARO had reported to 12 different congressional oversight committees. We do these things, however, all of those activities are funded by the U.S. taxpayer, and our elected officials ensure that we're doing it properly. I will tell you at the cabinet secretary level, at the service level, the department level, at the IG level, I had both the DOD and the ICIGs on speed dial, as well as both as the DOD SAPCO and the IC CAPCO, who are personal friends of mine. We exchange information all the time. A lot of times during interviews, people would come in and claim that there was an alien technology recovery program or exploitation program. Often, these people were not read into the programs. However, there were legitimate programs of record where the U.S. government, with its allies, would actually recover technology that didn't belong to us. We would do that. These people had improper or distorted understanding of what was going on. We do recover alien space craft, but all the ones that I'm aware of were launched by human beings on this planet. All the materials that we were asked to examine came from this planet, were invented here. We found nothing based off its composition that came from outside of our solar system. We extensively had blind tests with multiple world-respected scientific labs, where we would give them materials, and in some cases, paid millions of dollars for the analysis to understand how this material was manufactured and where it came from, what was its pedigree, how was it used. Everything that we were given, everything that we examined came from this planet. There were individuals that were lawfully present at some of the test sites that saw some amazing technology. Based off their education, their worldview, they could misunderstand what was going on. They weren't read into the programs. They just saw something amazing. They would come into us. They would give us our statement. We would remind them that the non-disclosure agreements they signed are a lifelong obligation, where they could share with us. After the conversation was over, those NDAs were still in effect. We would then go to the archives of the test directors or the agencies or the bases where these incidents occurred and try to understand what happened at that time. When we saw a video, I read the test reports, I was always astonished on the accuracy of their descriptions.

TUP 40:49

We went to all of the places where they claimed to be hidden, to go out to the Nevada Test Range or Area 51, as you've heard, to the media, or going out to Dayton, you know, going out to the ranges of New Mexico. We look everywhere. Many times, there would be claims made to Congress, and we would have to go and investigate and look for the alien technology be hidden on those bases. We were there, we looked, we worked with facilities engineers, we worked with the base commanders, the wing commanders, trying to find any evidence for the the truth of these claims. We talked to Lockheed Skunk Works, we talked to IARPA, DARPA, all of the national level labs that are taking technology readiness level, you know, two and threes, and trying to engineer a solution and have a workable prototype, you know, at four or five and six before we actually feel a new technology. We looked, we had many claims, we could not validate any of them, and we actually looked very, very hard. We had great cooperation. It's very hard to prove a negative.

TUP 45:30

Sean had an incredible Rolodex based off the community that he came from, the space, missile and rocket community that he came from. He actually had great insight from the US industrial base, those large manufacturers that have been developing solutions and technology for the US government for many, many years.

TUP 46:55

We also had a lot of people that came to us that claimed to have worked in these programs that signed, you know, non-disclosure agreements, you know, threatening them for life if they were to share secrets. We examined those cases. We went to the locations that claimed they were. We could not find anything. And we did a legitimate search. Also, we did have the full cooperation of the FBI, the Department of Defense, investigative organizations, Office of Special Investigations, NCIS. They all aided us at different times at different locations, independent of the, or it was Department of the Navy, Army, you know, Air Force base or contract that was in question. So we did the best we could.

TUP 50:14

One, I was still in uniform, before the F-117 program became public, I was actually operating with the first Marine Division out in the Chalk Mountains by Yuma, and we actually sighted those early stealth fighters in the daylight, they're not invisible, and we didn't know what they were, it didn't look like any aircraft we recognized, and we actually had recorded it, and we were told it didn't happen, and don't worry about it, it's not your problem, and we understood the rules.

TUP 51:23

There is a small percentage of the cases that AARO research that we could not explain, some of the phenomenas were concerning, if you look at new technologies are emerging or just possibly disruptive technologies, part of AARO's mission was to prevent technological and operational surprise, when we see something like that, a lot of the speculation about the American public when they were seeing all these unidentified, what they call drones flying around, who's operating them and why, there were some things that we confirmed, we were able to detect, they shouldn't have been there, we need to understand who's operating them and why, and be able to control aeropace or the waters around critical infrastructure or operational forces, the world's just too dangerous of a place not to have that ability. The current director decided to go public and admit that, there were things we did not understand, so I'm not saying anything new, the concern about the black triangle, and I did want to clear some, I haven't personally seen one, okay, I know it said, I see why, I haven't, I've read the reports, we've interviewed very, very critical force protection officers who have, there are some images, I myself haven't seen it, but because I have in the past, aware of the flying wing, the triangles, I know that that is possible and part of the state of the art of operational systems, so that was my concern, is maybe an adversary, has perfected, you know, an aircraft with stealth characteristics, that could operate with impunity in very sensitive, protected places, so that's a concern that I would have, and AARO would always respond when we had incident reporting at very sensitive locations, because we'd see that as a national security threat, and that's well within the sweet spot of AARO's mission to respond, and it's our duty and responsibility to develop sensors, be able to detect it, and pass that information to organizations that could deal with it.

TUP 54:42

I'm a Christian, so I believe in supernatural things. I think there's dimensions beyond the physical world that we live in today. I believe that in different dimensions, the rules of physics as we understand them may not apply. So there could be a dimensionality to some of these incidents that we do understand. And the things we use to try to detect, you know, measure and observe, won't work, because they're operating with a different set of physics. I don't know. I haven't witnessed that. It could explain some of the cases. These people see things, they believe them. You know, if I wasn't curious, and I wasn't honest enough to say, look, I don't know. I'm not the right, I wouldn't have been the right person to serve as deputy and the acting director there. I think we have got a little bit of community that we don't know everything about this phenomenon.

TUP: 1:00:56

AARO is doing a lot of work to baseline on, you've probably heard about some of our gremlin, our ground-based passive and active radar UAP surveillance systems. We've had some other systems in some national security sites operating for almost a year, just trying to baseline what “normal” is. AARO actually responded to provide surveillance expertise and capability to deal with covert UAS issues. So there's a lot more collaboration and cooperation in the U.S. government. We're tackling it as a national security concern, even though I don't recall a single case at AARO work where there was hostile behavior by UAP.

TUP 1:02:35

To me, the activity of some of these unexplained cases, we saw where there was an attempt to avoid detection and evade. To me, that's human activity. So I did not see any evidence of any UAP case where there was supernatural activity. There were flight characteristics that we didn't quite understand. Theoretically, it's possible. Were we aware of a fielded system that could operate in that matter? The answer is no,

TUP 1:06:52

That was one of the very important things that Sean and I were able to do, is actually work with the Joint Staff J3 and actually have written published guidance and DOD instructions to the Defense to be able to report UAP incidents or remove that stigma.

TUP 1:09:57

Yankee Blue was the program of record. And it was a false UAP program. If you read it, it never even talked about extraterrestrial. They didn't talk about UAPs, but it was talking about an anti-gravity motor or engine, and the image was the classic 1950s UFO spacecraft.

TUP 1:16:08

We did receive a lot of archives since we kind of assumed that mission after Jay's organization was stood down. I saw no evidence for that. And any of the materials that was passed to AARO, I'll let Jay explain his beliefs. I'm not here to either defend it or criticize it.

TUP 1:17:43

There's things that we don't understand. The U.S. government has admitted that.

TUP 1:15:14

We don't want to tip off our adversaries. We understand what they're doing. And I will tell you that there were partial signatures of unusual events reported to AAROs at UAP over a period of years with additional collection, targeted collection, cooperation of the intelligence community. We were able to complete our understanding and gain new knowledge into adversary capabilities. I can't discuss that, but we're not completely blind. We do understand that people want to gain an advantage. And it's a continuous game of measures and countermeasures. There's always new advancement, new technologies are being fielded. That goes back to that task, to prevent technological and operational surprise. Often where these new vehicles with unusual stealth technologies are detected on very remote sites where we do have some, you know, important military capabilities, but we're talking trying to pick thousands of square miles sometimes.

TUP 1:22:19

I think the US government to probably afford more disclosure. As you gain a better understanding of how difficult it is, how difficult it is to do the security assessment and declassify even if something's declassified, there's another step on public disclosure. So, we can declassify, but then you go one more step and then the US government has to determine, is it in the interest of the US government to disclose to the public ?

TUP 1:23:16

often, we had some detection and the stuff that we detected wasn't US technology, it was our friends who are developing capabilities on ranges, you know, owned and managed by the US. So that was the reason for things to be classified. Often when we had pattern and life collection operations, we would just sit there and across the spectrum what hyperspectral collection over a site, we would detect things that the US government did not want to share with the American public. And then we would work with them, you know, to triage and to protect those capabilities so we could preserve them and use them when it's to our advantage.