781. Alex Dietrich, We Don't Know What We Saw

0:00I'm glad to be here. Thank you. I have to say to people that have listened to me for a long time, your presentation was exactly what a lot of people needed to hear. And I meant it when I said that was the best presentation that I've been to. So when I really appreciate it and I would vote for you if you ran for president. Thank you. But anyway, just level-headedness and we had a conversation yesterday and but I want to ask a little bit more about you. What was your goals in life and how did you end up becoming a Navy pilot and how did all that happen?

1:01Sure. Well, I was an only child and so I had I always felt like I was missing out on sublains and a larger family but later in life I realized that I was actually quite fortunate to have all of the attention and the resources. So I had very good education. I went through private schools in Chicago and then ended up going to the public's boarding school outside of Chicago. It's called the Illinois Math and Science Academy. And so this was a place where we lived, we boarded and we were able to spend 24-7 studying and researching and pursuing anything that we found curious and interesting and we were encouraged to explore and to think through a scientific lens, math and science academy, but also to really dream out loud and in technicaler. So one of our

2:05founders of that institution was Leon Letterman and so he's the Nobel physicist and he was right down the road at Fermi Lab which is the Department of Energy Federally Funded Research and Development Center there outside of Chicago. And so when you talk to big brains like Leon and Einstein or anybody who has won the Nobel or been acknowledged and recognized for their thinking it's often because they were thinking outside the box. They were curious and they had both their nose to the grindstone in terms of getting in the lab and doing the hard work but also their head in the clouds about what might be possible. And so that's my background and where I came of age I was also a young person in the 90s in Chicago where the Chicago Bulls were

3:07withing all of their championships and you know relatively soon after Title 9 opened up so many doors for girls and women in sports and so I was very fortunate to be at a point and place where I was encouraged to pursue athletics and that was a huge part of my life. So all of this converged at a time when I was 16, 17, 18 years old and the adults in my life said you have to make a choice you have to chart a course and stay on track to pick a college and a career and you know get a figured out and I thought well there's so much that I'm interested in and not to sound cocky but so much that I'm good at now when I'm young and strong and well trained or well educated and so I had a

4:10college counselor who sat me down and he said listen kid you need to pick a major and then we need to pick a school a dream school and then a backup you know or plan B school if you didn't get into the first choice and you know let's let's get on track here focus focus and I said Mr. Hernandez I said Mr. Hernandez you know I we've done the assessments and they said that I could be a park ranger or a neurosurgeon so you know I'll just I'll undeclared majors and option on all these college forms so that sounds appropriate and you know I'm looking at schools west coast east coast all up and down and he said listen kid he said okay listen picture yourself when you're 40 and I want you to try to imagine yourself looking back what do you

5:11want to have accomplished wow who do you want to be at that point and I said oh I said Mr. Hernandez this is very helpful I said all the 40 year olds I know are getting divorced they're switching careers they're going through a midlife crisis and he said no no no that's what I meant you know and I said oh this is very helpful I said you know what this tells me is that I need to get my midlife crisis out of the way up front while I'm young while I have the strength and the eyesight and the energy to do something and so I'm going to travel the world I'm going to have an adventure I'm going to do something worthwhile and so that's where this background in sports and feeling physically strong and you know hand-eye coordination and all of that merged with the academics of math and science and a technical you know I ended up going into engineering in college but all of it was not newly oriented towards becoming

6:16a military pilot and at first I thought I would go to the Air Force because I didn't know I didn't have legacy tradition of military service in my family both of my grandfather served in World War II briefly but as most of that generation did but it you know I didn't have parents or siblings that were serving so when I thought about having an adventure you know in the military I thought oh well obviously I'll go into the Air Force and fly and then somebody glued me in and said no if you want to fly you actually should go into the Navy because there's so much more opportunity and so that's what led me down the path of the Navy ROTC scholarship and eventually commissioning into the Navy and going to flight school and did you get your dream did you get to do all the traveling you wanted to do I did you know something that I mentioned when we had the the Q&A and that I always kick off when I'm teaching a new semester to my

7:21students I introduced myself and I tell them when I was in your shoes when I was 18 19 20 years old I was very selfish and self-centered and I joined I signed up to serve because I wanted to have an adventure and travel the world and it was all about me and my experience and so I went through and I got a debt free education at the Navy paid for it but I I graduated and commissioned in May of 2001 and then I headed to flight school that summer you start off with ground school where you're doing you know learning from the books whether and flight rules and regulations and navigation and doing the physiology you know the dunker and the pool and all that stuff so my first flight in an aircraft was actually the morning of 9 11 amazing and so in that day in that moment everything

8:28changed I had this this personal professional moment that coincided with this paradigm shift for the world and it it instantly rewired my my my prefrontal cortex just suddenly just said you've taken a note you're an officer in the military you're going to go into harm's way this isn't just a fun adventure this is real and you need to figure out right now how you're going to contribute in a meaningful way and so again I was already an athlete I was already type A and you know inclined to just devour all of the the technical manuals and the the tactical lessons and all of that but I really came at it with a different motivation from September of 2001 forward and I got my wings in March of 2003 and

9:32so that's of course when we the US went into a rock so that was another personal professional milestone that coincided with our big collective experience and so that really set another pivot point in my brain about what I'm doing what I'm a part of and and yeah and then we went off to the fleet and did our pre-deployment training which is probably at a point where you want to talk a little bit more but then you know deployed in 2005 and 2007 supporting troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan with closer support and then I went back to Afghanistan in 2010 as a provincial reconstruction team engineer so almost a decade after I graduated they called me up and they said you have a degree in civil engineering and I said you're talking to me oh yeah I forgot

10:33about that and they said yeah everything that you blew up in your F18 we need you go back and rebuild which is like instant karma you know to be there on the ground with with the people and in a very different way than you are from the air where it's kind of sterile and filtered through the radios or through the sensors I've been a long time firm with Chris Lito and you know I'm no you know who he is he is a Air Force pilot okay I think you may have been on his show maybe yeah I've done a lot but anyway you know and I always think of it in this way they're not just gonna put anyone and something that is so technical and so advanced and so expensive you're not gonna I think I heard you say an 80 million dollar plane yes at the time and then when you add on all the you know we have these sort of modular pods you can stick on them you go over a hundred million pretty quick wow yeah that's pretty amazing and yeah we don't lose a lot of

11:34them but you know I mean they're they're usually reasons why these things happen when yeah but a lot of I don't know if it's always pilot error when we you know a majority of the losses of these planes I don't even know but we don't have to get into any of that so I had the pleasure I think I've interviewed almost everyone except David Fraver and I was lucky enough to sit a few rose behind him when he testified in Washington DC and never got to meet him he seems like also like a total no nonsense type of person and as we like to say he's a good American yeah and I appreciate it that he did his testimony there and thought it was very very good and also Ryan Gray's been on the show but every almost everyone from the limits that you've seen that hole in sitting Kevin Day I'm a big fan of Ryan's and especially the Americans for safe aerospace yes and I had a question come in from someone related to that that

12:37wanted me to ask you I think their question is is there gonna be any transparency at any point within either reports that go to the ASA are you aware of that I just want to get that question out of the way yes so I'm not sure specifically Michael actually serves also in the ASA one of the advisory committees do you know are they going to release or how what's the the feedback mechanism I'm pointing off camera here my husband is this is the first time that he's accompanied me to a UAP engagement but his background is astronomy and physics he was a marine weapons systems officer and so when I got involved with and was asked to serve as on the air crew advisory panel with Ryan I said you should talk to Mike because I think he's better qualified than I am to inform so much of the technical aspects so let me follow up on that and I'll let you know what I find out okay that's fine thank you yeah so

13:39yeah Kevin Day has he came forward because he actually found a show I did with somebody Robert Powell I'm not sure if you even know who that is but he's a science science-type guy engineer and he and I had a conversation about the Nimitz incident when a very first came out and Kevin Day just happened to find it in contact I mean I got him all involved with with all that you know Kimming and out there PJ who's in a carrying him with a lot of them have been on but I just think I've said many times I think this is one of the top cases and UAP encounters UFO encounters because of all the data and the witnesses and all that so I know when we had a conversation you said to me I'm not a UFO person and I gotta tell you I don't know why but I like that better because you know a lot of times people may assume all this person was always into UAP and then you know it's just an excuse and they're exaggerating or whatever it

14:40is but you're not that you're not that person and you also said something very important you said I don't know what it was and you don't want to pretend that you know what it was but I have to ask you if you can recall what the very first feeling and thought was when you first observed it 22 years ago yeah I know something like that yeah kind of in the matter you know I I've been talking about it for years and I'm not a UAP person let me let me maybe unpack it go back to the and there was a very nice young lady out in the the hall who said you know did you go back to your engineering friends and try to figure out or ask them about the material science element or this you know the and I said no I said in in 2004 and especially after this incident happened I was on a ship in the middle of the ocean this was before social media this was before we all had

15:46smartphones and and if I had reached back to my network of engineers it would have been a bunch of civil engineers and so unless I had questions about the strength of reinforced concrete you know they wouldn't have been very helpful so I at the time of the incident didn't stress about it or try to investigate it myself I just wasn't compelled to and I didn't have kind of infrastructure or network of people around me that would have facilitated investigating myself and I also it just didn't scratch that part of my brain that it seems to do in other people and I don't say that with contempt I say that in a way of saying like my brain is just different yeah and it's just not interested in UFO stuff mm-hmm and that doesn't mean that when people approach me

16:47about it that I don't want to engage it's just that you know when I fall asleep tonight even after talking about it all day long I'm going to be thinking about other things yeah as I drift off to sleep that's a good idea because the tapes that play in my mind are around my three children around the work that I'm doing now I do have a full-time job it's an HR so I got a lot of different tapes playing you know people are wild oh yeah people are crazier than my science fiction you could imagine yeah so I've got things that are going on in my head that I prefer to think about and just also that take up a lot more space and I don't think about UFOs unless and until someone else brings it up and so even as soon as last week I forgot that I was coming to move on as the keynote

17:47speaker and it popped up on my calendar I put a little block of time that said you know write your remarks for move on yeah and I thought I thought what is this muffin like I misspell muffin like what's going on what am I doing and then I said oh move on oh that's that UFO thing what is that where is that did I book tick like do I flights you know what's the hotel situation and so and we're laughing but and it's I'm not saying that it doesn't matter it's not important an important topic it's just not that important to me so let me tell you the the emotional roller coaster of that day which and this sounds terribly arrogant when I say it but it was just a boring old day at the office which if you think about strapping on you know an F18 super hornet and launching off the deck of a carrier how could that be boring it was routine it was normal and

18:50that's part of why we train the way we do is so that when things are not normal we fall back on that that steady state and so if you had strapped on this is a heart rate monitor like a whoop strap that gives me my steps and my sleep dad and all that so if you had had monitors on us November 14 2004 all the air crew that were involved and probably the folks on the Princeton our heart rate our adrenaline everything just you wouldn't even have known that anything was going on and so we launched we were in what we called the administrative phase of flight so we're checking our fuel levels we join up on each other like a rendezvous and then we visually inspect each aircraft to make sure that there's no weird panel hanging off or that are landing gear retracted when

19:53we lifted that lever so all of these things were we're going through our checklist we're drinking some gatorade and having some granola bar right so we're taking care of ourselves kind of like you see athletes do before practice or a game this wasn't a big game because we're not on deployment and going into a real combat mission but this is kind of like a scrimmage where we're going to on that particular day we were the red air so we were pretending to be the bad guys and then our blue forces were going to come and you know we're gonna have some some fights right but the whistle hadn't blown yet right we were still in our warm-ups we were still just stretching and getting ready and so that's the mindset the emotional state that that all of us were in and people always ask why didn't you turn on the tapes because we weren't expecting

20:57anything exciting to happen we were part of our routine is that when we get when the whistle blows when the scrimmage starts we go fights on tapes on Eagle picture right that's where we we flip literally flip the switch and the tapes start to record but in this case we were just mining our business you know getting transiting to our catpoint when the Princeton controller vectored us off course and to intercept and and do the you know to see if there was something there there and so I think they were as surprised as we were that there was something there so as I mentioned in the speech you know the the disturbance in the water was what helped me get a visual tally and somebody among the four of us had called it out who had said you know what's

21:57going on in the water and so look down eyes were drawn right to that spot and and as we translated to the intercept I had asked my backseat was oh I said you know what what he thinks happening what what's going on and he said well it could be somebody running drugs up the coast you know from Mexico or or went south and I thought oh this is exciting you know something real real world yeah but so then when I saw this disturbance in the water my heart sank because I thought oh whatever we were whoever we were trying to intercept has crashed and is sinking and now we are unseen commanders for a search and rescue effort but then almost as quickly as by you know this is the emotional roller coaster of totally bored excited devastated and then picking up the visual the tick-tack and

23:06going what the hell is that like another form of excitement and confusion and who's the first to see it do you know I don't know I didn't come from one side of you I mean what do you remember so from my orientation I always say that it entered stage left so for the way that I was oriented and you know we've got two different aircraft and we're two different altitudes and you know banked one way or the other so from my view I came in stage left so it came from left to right over this water disturbance and again I don't know whether the disturbance in the water was related to the UFO the tick-tack that we affectionately refer to it as yeah but if it hadn't been for the water disturbance I think that I would have had a hard time picking up a tally because my position in the flight was to maintain sight of the lead aircraft David Fraver and his was oh and then to de-conflict and then also I was just new in the squadron you

24:11know not entirely you know I was confident but I wasn't as experienced so when Fraver engaged did you hold back is that what so I stayed in what's called high cover okay which if you could imagine your friend you know getting into a bar fight and you say yeah I got your back you know and just sort of hang back a bit and then so you saw that whole situation when it reacted with him and all that that must have been awful bizarre it was weird it was so weird yeah yeah and I'm sorry and I was gonna say you know you asked who saw it first it's very hard to tell so it's easy to tell me on the radio because I have a woman's voice everybody else has masculine voice and there's my there's me there's my wizzo there's Dave Fraver there's his wizzo we have two different radio channels that we are transmitting on and we each have an inter cockpit system so that's

25:17you know one two it's like four different conversations that are happening simultaneously and you know on top of each other and because it wasn't a standard situation if we had been providing that close air support for a convoy on the ground at a rock in Afghanistan and it if a firefight had broken out we would have had very calm crisp we call it radio discipline I see calm discipline because we have words for that because first of all we train for this we've seen it and we've role played it in ways from every angle so that we say yeah you do this and I do this right some of it we don't even need to talk about but when we do need to talk we have calm brevity terms we have words and phrases that we put out yeah and something happens and then we'd say

26:19something else and we do our checklist our tactics as we've trained as we know to do in this scenario nothing made sense right we weren't supposed to be we were supposed to be at our cap point providing red air for our teammates and it's completely different mission right so this whole thing was just rude yeah right interrupting our day and what the hell is this thing right where did it come from what is it doing how is it doing that is it a threat it's very cool right I'm both delighted and also unnerved and we don't have any weapons we have no way to defend ourselves right what are we supposed to do in this moment and then like that it's gone and we're scrambling so all of these people including the folks on the Princeton are trying to get a word in or trying to

27:22communicate the shock and on whatever we're experiencing and so it's kind of comical now we were to reenact it and and I did with the first time that I saw the video of the gimbal yes case I remember the very first time I was in the Pentagon and the folks at I don't know whatever that office was that Lynn Wright yeah so it was in her office and they showed me this video clip and which is now you know out yeah all over the internet but I watched it and hearing the air crew yeah so it's here to my mind now yeah there was and I laughed out loud right I was sort of cackling in her office just I said yeah that's you know that's the natural that's a genuine reaction to something that

28:24doesn't make sense that's both like delightful because it's so like if you're curious you're like what is that how's it doing that but then also like one of my sources I feel vulnerable and I'm and maybe responsible right where in the middle of a military exercise in controlled airspace and it's not that long after 9-11 and there's a whole coast of California there that's heavily populated yeah you know are we what are we doing here now did you learn at any point that there are lots of these you know I'm in the Kevin Day claims he counted like 65 of them on upper 80,000 feet or something like that in the days prior to our encounter I believe he said you know along those lines yeah so so many years later when I was going to the Pentagon and getting debriefed and you know had you could say official touchpoints that you know I I I expressed some concern after the fact of hey did we get vectored into some test

29:28right are we we were were we unwittingly put it in harm's way where this was a missile test was the churning water a submarine that had come up to fire something and it was resubmerging and I was reassured at every turn that no it wasn't a blue system there were no subs in the area you know that that we genuinely we the U.S. Department of Defense writ large that we don't know what it was I'm so glad you're saying this and the reason I'm so glad you're saying it is because I have been in discussions many times with a lot of people that have an opinion that it was our own tech working out to see how we'd react to it I've had so many discussions and you know my if I have a side at all it's like I don't think so and when I mentioned that to Kevin Day he got very emotional and

30:29angry about he said if that's true then they put people in harm's way right he was very angry about it if it were true he would be very angry about it and I've been reassured that it's that it's true that it was not that we did not know and there's no evidence that there was any blue force activity or even an ally activity in the space at that time but it does make you feel because that's what we're wired for in the military is a sense of friend or foe is this a threat or not a threat and so we wanted to know right away is like we're practicing our maneuvers here we're getting ready to go and deploy so if this is an adversary spying on us doing their information surveillance and reconnaissance then that's concerning and it you know much later years later when I really was encouraged by so many to say think about it think about it think about it I thought well it could be something other than friend or foe it

31:32could be a natural phenomenon it could be extraterrestrial could be crypto terrestrial right all these different theories that are out there I'm not dismissing any of them but what I would urge and I felt in the moment was you were in the middle of this of this carrier strike group activity and we're real close to a densely populated you know LA San Diego right and so if you're if you're gonna take off out of Covington International Airport tomorrow then you probably would like assurance that airspace doesn't have strange objects flying around that are unaccounted for I wouldn't want the air traffic controllers the FAA and United Airlines or Delta or whatever you're flying wouldn't you like that reassurance that the airspace is clear or

32:34deconflicted but if we've got weird breathments popping around that's a problem I'm not comfortable with that yeah yeah so if this is probably an unusual question for you but if you had a choice that you could make that this never happened once party of life would you rather it be like that or do you think this adds something somehow to your life well now you're in my life Martin and Cous and all the folks that I've all the good folks all the good people that I've met along the way so I wouldn't trade it for anything oh and it sounds cheesy but you know I wasn't hiding you know what happened in 2004 after a few years I was invited you know to come and tell the story in the Pentagon and on the Hill for Congress and then the media attention came and I don't consider myself a whistleblower I don't think that I came out and said

33:38I've got to tell the story I do have a life I do have kids I have a full-time job so it can be distracting and it can be exhausting when you are bombarded with requests for podcasts and interviews and all that sorry no no right it was sort of a meta discussion but I'm always glad after I do find that time you know and I will sort of set limits on myself or I say okay it's been a couple months since I've done an interview like let me let me suck it up and stay I mean the hours the Japanese and the British you know they want me to be awake at 2 a.m. to talk to their their audiences so I'm always a little fatigued or annoyed with the email exchanges and the you know gosh I've already I've told you the story yeah I've said it a thousand times but then whenever I'm finished with the interview or the engagement I'm always glad that I did it because

34:42inch by inch bit by bit I think we are advancing the conversation yeah I think we're moving the needle now there's some people who's just they want to get content for their clickbait you know and and they're sort of the grifters in the space who are you know selling things and promoting things but I think that and especially in the context of Mufon these are genuinely good people who are curious right the inquiry with integrity they're interested in doing it right they're interested in you know promoting that message of measured scientific methodology and so I'm very glad to speak with you and to be here at Mufon and to encourage your audience to pursue and and learn more in this space because it seems like it's almost infinite the number of encounters and

35:49phenomena and oh yes you know we say rabbit holes kind of like it's a bad thing but you know as Peter was speaking last night I was going on my phone down these Wikipedia rabbit holes going well I didn't even know that this was a thing you know what what is this phrase that he used what was it time time time time traveling but it's missing time missing time yeah basically part I've interviewed a number of people that have had an experience of some weight and then all of a sudden they look at their clock and it's four hours later right and that can happen when someone's in a car and they're driving and they they have a sighting they pull over and then they get home and they say what how could be three in the morning there's there's a lot of a lot of cases of that which is you know pretty interesting so what if we just listen to those people what if we just collected those experiences and the associated multimodal evidence or

36:50data that might be available and what if we ingested that and what if we what if we analyzed it without the ridicule yeah what if we what if we said you know there's something to this and we might not know what it is just now but it's worth it's worth looking at there was a story about a he was a neuro surgeon in Hawaii who had somebody come with whatever you go to a neurosurgeon for I don't know if they had tremors or migraines or something and he's a doctor and so he does the intake and like a good doctor says you know well when did these symptoms start and the person said you know with with hesitation they said shortly after my abduction and this doctor didn't laugh didn't roll his eyes he didn't shame them in any way he just said and when was that and he noted the date and then he proceeded

37:57to go through the rest of the exam and then to run scans and treat this individual and give them relief for their symptoms and so this person went back to their community you know I don't know if it was Reddit or Facebook group for abductees experiencers and they said hey guys I found a doctor who didn't treat me like it was crazy wow and so this doctor unwittingly became the doctor to abductees and collected this you know the series of brain scans and said look I don't know I'm not saying that all of these people have been abducted by aliens but what I can tell you is they think they have been they feel they have been and I've got a data set here I've got a set of brain scans that are different hmm these scans don't look like the brains from the medical textbooks or from the ones who have

39:00epilepsy or the ones who have these other things and he's like either there's something happening here either there's you know they were born with this physiology and it makes them have this sensation that the feeling or they've been abducted or something's happened and it's caused this sort of brain damage but wouldn't it be helpful to stop ridiculing to stop shaming these people and instead invite them to come in and to have a scan and to add to our pool of data here and to get to the bottom of this this phenomenon whatever the phenomenon is right and so that's that's very good Dr. John Mack who was mentioned last night in Peter's presentation a Harvard was he was Harvard professor of an entrepreneur remember what his specialty was in psychology but he really did a lot of work on that unfortunately he was killed by a front driver

40:02and wondered but he still did a lot of work on that and treated all these people with respect and said these people are not crazy you know something happened to them yeah and anyway I think that's really good now I'm going to try to shift gears a little bit and just to go back because been curious about this one situation when you landed and the days after what was talked about did whether there's a talking between you and your wizzo and command a favor or any talking about this at all and I know there was some ridicule about it there's there there was a drawing or some type of yes there were cartoons every every day there's a air plan sort of a schedule of all the flights and all and there's always a cartoon and people you know they'll repurpose far side jokes or things like that but then also people hand draw now we would call the memes

41:03yes yeah and so for a few days there were memes about aliens that think yeah yeah yeah and so it was all ended fun I don't remember particular conversations but I do know that months later so when we were actually out on our deployment you know there would be people who would again sort of I wasn't thinking about it but they would come in the wardrobe and they would sit down and they'd say so you know and they'd want to yeah and I'd be like oh yeah that happened that was weird you know so but there wasn't there wasn't an official debrief right we weren't that's kind of unusual I think well we think it's weird now but also it gets to the point of there's no infrastructure right there's no there's got to be an office at the Pentagon that cares about this and when I say care I mean that they're authorized to do this work and they're funded to do this right to care about something means that it's it's it's authorized in the NDA national defense authorization act right like

42:09this is your charge and here's your resources to do it and so at that time there wasn't you know a top of the chain of command you can think of the org chart let alone you know any say buddy of the middle managers let alone the people on the front lines with a checklist or a debrief template or you could argue even the tools the hardware right we should now all have a UAP kit right that we that we carry just like you know the helmet bag with our all over other gear there should be a little bag right that has binoculars and NVGs and you know make sure the batteries are charged and the you know long-range camera like all the things plus the sort of checklist I can ask so many good technical questions right yeah was there a shadow I don't know yeah I wasn't even thinking to look for a shadow well speaking of that did you observe

43:11those legs that may have come down did you happen to see them not visually not visually I saw them on the flare footage I see when we looked at that in the in the ready room yeah after the other the other aircraft came back a cycle after us well but so all these technical good technical questions you can guarantee that if I walk outside this afternoon and see something I've got 80 things in my head that I'm gonna tick down through in you know almost simultaneously I'm gonna listen for static in the air right I'm gonna see if the hair on the you know like I'm gonna see what my you know my smelling sulfur yeah I'm gonna think about you know is there ringing in my ears all the questions that have been asked after the fact yeah that I was not thinking about before the encounter sure that in the sort of chaos of the relatively brief encounter and now 22 years later you know it's hard to get that raw that if somebody had asked me on November 14th 2004 I may have

44:21been able to more systematically unpack the events of that day you know or even within a few days weeks or months it would have been more effective when I did finally get called into the Pentagon in 2007 or 8 you know I 2009 yeah I mean it was years after the fact and I said as much when they called me yeah what took you so long yeah like where have you been yeah you know and at that point I was annoyed because they wanted to ask me all these you know the shade of white right was it egg shell was it a bright white you know I was like you know give me some Sherman William paint chips here you know and I'll pick one out for you but you know this would have been really helpful yeah like immediately following now I'm trying to pick out yeah a nuance that that's fading quickly with time

45:23and that is a really good interesting question that someone asked about the shadow that's great question there are people that are saying that you know they're observing these things going in and out of water with no splash they're observing supersonic speeds never a sonic boom you know I mean really interesting things yeah that really makes it more puzzling you know we don't hear the sonic boom in the aircraft oh yourself because you're ahead of it yeah but I mean but you hear another sonic boom elsewhere you would not know so like we're in flight situations and and I've actually accidentally slipped past the 1.0 month yeah yeah and said oops and out over the water doing you know in a controlled airspace and all that but it's it's interesting because you don't actually have the sensation of the awareness and and the other people in the flight you know they don't either so it's very familiar with sonic boom because I lived across the river up

46:24in a hill from a air force base yeah and used to hear them all the time as a yeah in the rattling in the windows and everything yeah so the car alarms yeah we get a lot of angry calls on the base oh wow yeah so you have said it when we were talking I mentioned to you that I thought it was really great that you decided to basically come out and not be anonymous and you said to me that's not exactly what happened yeah can you talk a little bit about that sure yeah so it's it's a nuance but I think it's an important point that you know I was never in hiding the event happened in 2004 I started getting recalled to the Pentagon to to talk about it you know in 2009 2010 2011 and then I started I went to Afghanistan I had my deployment there and I did defense languages too before I went out there so it's not that I was like avoiding it I was just

47:27literally on the other side of the world doing other things and then when I came back you know that's when we started having kids so I was pregnant or nursing or you know just doing all the things that when you have very very little children you do so it was in I guess 2017 when the New York Times featured David Fraver and and this story came out and with that with the written report which was never classified and our encounter was never classified an amazing because it's and this I think is testament to this you know the conspiracy theorist who say oh the Pentagon you know they're hiding something if it was if they were trying to hide something we would have all signed non disclosure agreements and we wouldn't be talking about it right but because we don't and this is why the Pentagon doesn't know what it is because we don't know what it was that we saw that day it's unclassified oh wow and so that's why we can

48:34talk about it that's why I can talk about it here with you and I've talked about it over the years now so in 2017 this written report which was never classified it was just kept you know on our Pentagon servers I guess you could say because it did have names and information about the air crew involved it was leaked in a sense and not leaking classified information but just leaking part we call it PII personal identifiable information on the internet and so you could say we were doxed and then that created this flood of requests for interviews by media outlets and you know outreach from just curious concerned people some of whom seem really you know on the one end of the conspiracy spectrum and then even some others on the other end who were you know hardcore debunkers

49:37and you know why don't you believe in science and how dare you fuel the conspiracy theories and I was like well and that's really where I said whoa well wait I am aggressively neutral you know I'm open to what's possible but I also you got to bring me receipts yeah you got to show me the the evidence here and so 2017 I had just had my middle child and I was pregnant or or soon thereafter pregnant with my third child and so I really I wasn't feeling camera ready about a hundred pounds heavier than I am right now and just you know and DC in the summer it's not pretty so you know when people were saying hey do you want to come on national TV and talk about UFOs I was like I don't want to talk about anything right now yeah you know I just want to take care of my babies and I was teaching right so I was taking care of my

50:38students and all that so you know why did it take a couple of years for me to come out I never felt an urge to I wasn't a whistleblower and then I would say rather than me coming out I'd say I kind of got worn down and so when 60 minutes you know came knocking Dave and I talked about it and naively I said you know maybe I could do one and be done one interview and never have to talk about it again and so here we are and here we are you know many years later yeah and I don't have any regrets you know I thought that's good yeah now have just last question here have any of the weasels the two in the back in the back seat have any of them talked about this publicly do you know they so I know at least the one in my back seat has he was on a news channel I don't know which one it was mainstream you know it was either CNN or one of those those types and I don't think it was

51:46a good experience for him oh I think they played spooky music for the intro and I think that they ridiculed a bit and they're questioning oh I hate that and I think he walked away with a really bad taste in this mouth yeah and so I've been I you know I don't have an agent or anybody and I don't get going to get paid for any of this yeah maybe I should know since you'll be a lot of time yeah no no but it's up to me and that's part of what takes me a while to respond to inquiries and all this because I have to vet myself and so I try to make sure that it's a reputable yeah and you know news platform and and I'll always ask the producers when they reach out you know what what's your angle yes and how are you going to advance the conversation yeah because if you're just going to recycle the same old talking points for your uh your clickbait you know your your content for for likes and views and whatever they're selling advertisers uh you know I'm not

52:52really interested in that but I was honored when um who's the funny guy the comedian last week tonight John Oliver oh yes yeah they reached out and they said hey we're doing I was fascinated because they're pieces they're hilarious they're funny but they also seem really well research yes and I thought it must take months to build an episode it really is such a quick turn around they said hey we're doing the episode for this week you know can we can we talk to you and um get the download on on all of that and so when there's a platform that is kind of new or fresh or interesting um I do I do you know like to engage and advance the conversation yeah well I want to thank you so much it's been really really wonderful a pleasure to meet you and you're an asset to you know this whatever you want to call it um helping move things forward and a very balanced

53:53way and really really appreciate it and um glad you agreed to be on thanks so much for having me Martin thanks for all you do for this all-coloured community yes that's a good name for it thank you yes again