UFOs, the Channel Islands and the Navy's 'drone swarm' mystery
The Navy has a perplexing mystery on its hands. For several weeks in 2019, unknown objects stalked U.S. warships off the coast of southern California. According to documents reviewed by The Drive, the first reports of unidentified objects hovering and flying near Navy vessels sparked a sweeping, high-level investigation. The Navy, working with the FBI and Coast Guard, now appears to have ruled out civilian activity or U.S. military operations as plausible explanations for the encounters. This leaves two possibilities, each with extraordinary implications. Either a foreign adversary is spying on Navy ships around the Channel Islands (which lie just west of Los Angeles and San Diego), or devices of truly unknown origin are operating with impunity around U.S. (and allied) vessels.
The implications of a foreign power deploying drones to spy on American warships just off the California coast are immense. For starters, this scenario suggests a monumental U.S. counterintelligence failure. Moreover, such a brazen and technically complex intelligence operation amounts to an enormous gamble for a hostile nation. Any shoot-down – as the Navy reportedly attempted – of a foreign surveillance drone so close to U.S. shores would invite sweeping geopolitical repercussions.
Importantly, if the UFOs that stalked the Navy warships were part of an adversarial intelligence collection effort, the objects’ operators made little effort to conceal their presence. Videos taken aboard one U.S. vessel show the mysterious craft displaying bright and flashing lights. At the same time, Navy radar operators tracked the objects with apparent ease, even expressing surprise as the craft engaged in anomalous maneuvers. In another video, a spherical object (which has noteworthy parallels to UFOs observed by fighter pilots off the U.S. east coast) appears to descend slowly into the ocean.
In a notable 2004 incident, air controllers aboard a Navy guided missile cruiser watched as mysterious radar tracks suddenly appeared around San Clemente Island. The radar operators grew increasingly uneasy as the UFOs moved south at bizarrely slow speeds. With U.S. planes slated to conduct an air defense exercise in the same area as the unknown objects, controllers directed two F/A-18 fighter jets to investigate the nearest radar contact. As the jets approached, all four aviators aboard the two-seat fighters observed a “Tic Tac”-shaped craft hovering and moving in extraordinary ways just above the surface of the ocean. The object, which had no discernible engines, rotors, wings or other control surfaces, then mirrored the maneuvers of the lead fighter jet before accelerating instantaneously out of sight.
After descending tens of thousands of feet in less than a second, the object reappeared on radar 60 miles away, implying unimaginably fast velocities and g-forces.
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/588223-ufos-the-channel-islands-and-the-navys-drone-swarm-mystery