Speaking on Thursday (10) at the conference of Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning, retired Chief of Naval Operations Gary Roughead says UFOs remain a mystery.
The former US naval operations chief said on Thursday that unidentified flying objects that appeared to have outnumbered US Navy fighter pilots in videos shot in 2004 and 2015 remain a mystery.
Retired Admiral Gary Roughead said after a talk in Sarasota:
I watched the videos and, at least in my time, most reviews were inconclusive as to what they were. But the whole issue of self-defense is something the department is taking very seriously.
Three gun camera videos – one taken from a USS Nimitz-designated F-18 operating in Southern California in November 2004 and two more from USS Roosevelt-linked Super Hornets during maneuvers in Jacksonville in January 2015 – were authenticated as official images from the Department of Defense government last year.
The 2004 shooting target, dubbed “Tic Tac” by its oblong shape, dropped from 80,000 feet (24,000 meters) to 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) in less than a second, a speed that would have easily destroyed a conventional aircraft. New York Times spread the story in 2017 and last summer, in an unprecedented move, the Navy publicly announced that had issued new guidelines for its pilots to report “unidentified aircraft.”
Roughead led the Atlantic and Pacific fleets before serving as CNO from 2007 to 2011. Scheduled for a talk by Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning On China’s 21st century military strategy, the Admiral said that “there were not many” of these events at his command, but the development of “unmanned autonomous aircraft” remains a priority.
He informed:
I think we will continue to see new technologies in the form of unmanned systems that will begin to interfere with military capability. And we are not alone. There is no doubt that China and Russia want to plan.
Not knowing what they can be – are they phenomena or vehicles that someone has managed to establish? – I think one of the biggest challenges that most people saw is, where would they have come from? And frankly, I didn’t spend much time on this issue.
The retired Navy Commander, David Fravor, who chased the UFO Tic Tac and told this experience to the Times, also reported a related mystery occurring simultaneously underwater, under Tic Tac. Roughead said underwater weapon systems represent the next major evolutionary obstacle.
He said:
I remember there was one (UFO), and it may have been after I retired, which seemed to be underwater. If indeed it was a real vehicle, how was it launched and recovered? Because, as you know, it’s not easy to get something that can perform extraordinarily well in the air and dive into water and become something else. What was this phenomenon, I can not say.
Indeed, Roughead recalled how, in public speeches for defense contractors, he announced that the next “revolutionary” breakthrough will be submersible military material, whose source of energy could be “more transformative than autonomous things in the air.” He compared the scale of such ambitions to the Apollo Mission Moon photos, which will require “a triad of business, government and academia coming together.”
He said:
The aerodynamics, the hydrodynamics and the force required to be able to fly and operate at depths, and the power required to move at high airspeed, and then convert that energy into something underwater – these are huge technological challenges. There is no doubt that in the future of war, probably long after I leave, we will see this sort of thing starting to happen.
Imagine, said Roughead, being able to park virtually undetected military technology on the ocean floor in a strategic location, “tell it to sleep” indefinitely and activate it when needed.
But with a little insight, he added, investigations into these mind-blowing scenarios could be used to build bridges with rivals like China.
Roughead said:
We have to look for opportunities, we have to look for places where we can unite people who care to say, OK, there is a technological question here, how we will bring together brilliant minds.
How do we protect our legitimate national security and intellectual property technologies, but still face some of the difficult problems? I think it’s a way to close some gaps in the way and bring trust between the two.
The first step for me is: How do you define how we can work together to remove some of the sensitivities and suspicions? Until you have this discussion, you will not make any progress. The journey begins with the first step.