'Unknown Individuals' Confiscated Data from 2004 Nimitz UFO Encounter, Say Former Sailors

Five former Navy servicemen came forward recently to participate in an interview with Tim McMillan for Popular Mechanics, published on November 12th, regarding the now-famous 2004 Nimitz UFO incident .

According to a report acquired by journalist George Knapp in early 2019, between approximately November 10th and the 16th, 2004, as the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (CSG) was preparing for deployment, the USS Princeton "on several occasions detected multiple Anomalous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) operating in and around the vicinity of the CSG."

These AAVs would perform maneuvers unlike any with which the military pilots were familiar, including descending from "approximately 60,000 feet down to approximately 50 feet in a matter of seconds."

"[The objects] would then hover or stay stationary on the radar for a short time and depart at high velocities and turn rates," stated the document.

The craft that appeared in the above video was reported to be "an elongated egg or a 'Tic Tac' shape with a discernible midline horizontal axis," and was "solid white, smooth, with no edges...uniformly colored with no nacelles, pylons, or wings."

The report listed the object's size as approximately 46 feet in length.

It’s claimed in the interview for Popular Mechanics that, following one of the Nimitz UFO incidents, two “unknown individuals” confiscated all data collected from the encounter.

Petty Officer Patrick “PJ” Hughes, an aviation technician aboard the USS Nimitz, said he was told by his commanding officer to surrender the hard drive data recorders from the airborne early-warning aircraft to two unidentified individuals on November 14th, 2004, which included data recorded from a Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning Aircraft that had encountered the UFOs.

“We call them bricks, but they contain the software to run the airplane and they also record or can record a lot of the data that the air crew sees during the flight,” said Hughes.

“[The two unidentified individuals] were not on the ship earlier, and I didn’t see them come on. I’m not sure how they got there,” he said. "We put [the recently secured harddrives] in the bags, [my commanding officer] took them, then he and the two anonymous officers left."

Meanwhile, aboard the USS Princeton, Petty Officer 3rd Class Gary Voorhis had an encounter similar to Hughes.

“These two guys show up on a helicopter, which wasn’t uncommon, but shortly after they arrived, maybe 20 minutes, I was told by my chain of command to turn over all the data recordings for the AEGIS system,” said Voorhis.

Voorhis was also told by command to reload the recorders for the ship’s advanced Combat Engagement Center (CEC) because it had also been wiped clean, along with the optical drives with all the radio communications.

“They even told me to erase everything that’s in the shop—even the blank tapes," he said, adding that the only other time he recalled being commanded to turn over data tapes like that was after an aircraft crashed during one of his combat deployments.

According to Ryan Weigelt, the former Leading Petty Officer and power plant specialist for the SH-60B “Seahawk” helicopter, two men wearing generic flight suits initially arrived on the Princeton, but flew off in one of his detachment’s SH-60B helicopters before returning with "a bunch of bags." Weigelt said the two men retired to the “Admiral’s Quarters” on the Princeton, where a guard was posted outside of the door.

This news follows the chain of information slowly released through To the Stars…Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA) and government sources since 2017, when news broke of the Pentagon’s secretive UFO project—known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

Most recently, TTSA announced that it will be partnering with the U.S. Army to “advance materiel and technology innovations.” Prior to that, Luis Elizondo—a former Department of Defense (DoD) intelligence officer and program head for the AATIP, who currently serves as the TTSA Director of Global Security and Special Programs—told the New York Times that the results of any studies done on the “metamaterials” which TTSA announced were in their possession last July are still pending, due to the employment of the “scientific method.”

A few months prior to news of the reportedly acquired “metamaterials,” five Navy pilots told the New York Times that unidentified flying objects were an “almost daily” occurrence from the summer of 2014 through March 2015; two of the pilots, Lieutenant Ryan Graves and Lieutenant Danny Accoin agreed to go on record about their experiences with both the New York Times and for the History Channel UFO docuseries Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation—a project created in tandem with TTSA. The pilots’ testimony prompted several senators to request and receive private briefings on the encounters. In response to questions regarding the pilots’ reports, President Trump has gone on record as saying that he does “not particularly” believe that Navy pilots are seeing UFOs.

It is unclear at this time if the president’s statements reflect anything other than a general disinterest in the subject.

The narrative built from those accounts is not without controversy in the UFO community, having received some pushback from researchers. That argument stems mostly from the seemingly cyclical nature of the government’s public interest in UFOs, and the disinformation associated therewith—exacerbated by the presence within TTSA of former intelligence agency personnel in prominent positions. Those long-festering doubts of TTSA’s trustworthiness due to the corporation’s association with the U.S. government are now compounded following the public benefit corporation’s new agreement with the Army.

John Greenewald, Jr. of The Black Vault has done significant fact checking on claims made by TTSA and its representatives, most recently publishing a series of statements that show the U.S. Navy never cleared for public release three UFO videos distributed by Elizondo and TTSA, although the Navy did acknowledge the objects within the videos—referred to respectively as “FLIR1,” “Gimbal,” and “GoFast”—were “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Given these discrepancies in TTSA’s statements and their now apparent partnership with the U.S. Army, more people within the UFO community are expressing concerns that the public benefit corporation was created as a massive spin operation to control the narrative surrounding unidentified flying objects.

However, as more former and current military personnel come forward to relate their experiences with UFOs, there is little doubt within the community that, if nothing else, the cases being presented have merit.

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

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