What if the skies are not empty when we look up? And we see distant stars and the endless vastness of space. It's hard to fathom the sheer scale of the universe. Carl Sagan once called Earth the shore of the cosmic ocean, and we've barely waded in. The odds that an intelligent species not only exists, but has pinpointed our little island in crossed light years across the universe to visit us. It borders on the miraculous.
To put it another way, the odds are against Earth being visited by intelligent creatures and technology from outer space. And yet, quite often trained pilots, men and women with thousands of hours in the air report encounters with something they can't explain. Objects that defy gravity, speed and logic. Tonight we're not talking about stories from the campfire or conspiracy forums. We're talking about what pilots saw. Because maybe, just maybe, we're not alone. This is a study of strange.
Welcome back to the show. I'm Michael May, and to be very honest, listeners, today's topic intimidates me because out of all the strangeness I consume and study and share, I've only scratched the surface on this topic. And there's so much we don't understand about the universe. Whether you're a skeptic like me or not. I think we should be asking questions because there are strange things in the sky. So to help me understand this topic a little bit more is my friend Kari Pina.
How are you doing, Kari? Good. So, Kari, you were on the episode I covered about the Kenneth Arnold. Like the the birth of the term flying saucer before. And so you became without trying to my resident UFO person. Nice. And. Yeah. So if you like this kind of content and you haven't listened to that episode, go back and find it. The Kenneth don't know what. I think we did a good job with that. It was a really good episode.
And remind me, Kari, I don't know how you got started liking UFO stories and videos and things you may have told me before and I just don't remember, but when? When did you first start to be like, ooh, UFOs? Oh that's right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up fire in the Sky. And we may have even talked about this in the Kenneth Arnold episode and I don't remember, but yeah, that movie was terrifying. And I probably saw that far too young as well. Yeah. Yes yeah I agree.
we've talked about it a little bit in the past too. But you know, this subject does fascinate me. I love UFO stories. They fit into that sort of strangeness that I love. But I am a skeptic about being visited by creatures from another planet. However, today's episode, the reason I wanted to do this is their stories from pilots, and there's a variety of them that I'll share today. And pilots I don't. I wouldn't call them necessarily expert witnesses, but they have a lot of time in the air.
They see a lot of things. And so when a pilot says they see something that looks unnatural or not of this world or technology that we don't have yet, it adds some credibility to it. And specifically with the stories today, they all have, or at least most of them have videos. And the videos themselves are what I think are the best UFO videos out there, because a lot of UFO videos, I'm like never! But these are actually really weird. And they do leave me saying like, what the hell is that thing?
Also, I will be using the terms UAP and UFO interchangeably because I've been told that's okay to do. So. It just kind of depends on the story and what I've read. Do you have an opinion about that, Carrie? Are you like, do you say one or the other or. Yeah, yeah. from where we were. Well, I'm glad you mentioned sort of being reserved and being like, okay, I don't know what this is, but it's something because our first story is it's a biggie.
It's a big story in terms of like the history of UAPs and UFOs. And that's the story of Ryan Graves. And he's one of the people that spoke to Congress when they did a hearing about this in 2023. He is a formerly former US Navy F-18 pilot. He was the first active duty pilot to come forward publicly about seeing unidentified aerial phenomena.
And he's everybody's probably seen this guy or seen videos associated with him because he's been on like the Joe Rogan Podcast and 60 minutes in History Channel and interviewed in all the big magazines and newspapers. And not only has he witnessed strange things in the sky, but he thinks it's really important to talk about because they don't have pilots, don't have an official place to turn to to report about UAPs.
So he's created an entity called Americans for Safe Aerospace, which is for pilots. Both military and commercial pilots, to report sightings so they can start keeping track of these things. And this is because he he actually sincerely cares. He's not just like, oh, I love X-Files. So I want to learn about aliens. There's a lot of stuff in our sky, and it's becoming more and more dangerous to fly. And that's one of the reasons why he wants people to start tracking these things.
And even I'll go on a slight little, tangent here, but I really like this stuff. as an example of, like, a lot of stuff in our skies, there's over 5500 Starlink satellites in orbit, and that's just Starlink satellites. Obviously, there's a lot of other satellites as well. And there was a study done when a series of pilots reported unidentified objects in the sky, and they all were reporting them in the same place.
But the the pilots were in different positions, but they all were reporting objects in the same place at the same time. And so there was a study done using computers and math and 3D models and CGI and whatever to try to figure out what these objects were that all these pilots saw at the same time. And it turned out they were Starlink satellites.
And it's because Starlink satellites, they're in low-Earth orbit, and they can sort of, can release their panels and things like that and basically change their shape depending on what they're doing or what sort of, you know, if they're putting up solar panels or whatever. So it makes them very odd because they don't stay in one shape. And Starlink satellites as well were very bright.
I think they've now made them so they're not as bright because it was interfering with people studying the sky and things like that. But those are weird things that even pilots were like, whoa, what is that? And it turns out it's just a manmade object. So that's just to give a hint or a taste that there is a lot of stuff floating around. It can be dangerous and it can lead to sightings of strange things. But Starlink satellites do not explain everything.
So in terms of Ryan Graves in his story, And what he saw, he saw multiple times. So it's not like one flight. around 2014, graves was flying his f-18s with this squadron. That's what squadron is. Hard to say. Yeah, this squadron hates. So he was off the coast of Virginia Beach and they started to get weird hits in military airspace on their new radar system. And because it was a relatively new system, they were assuming that these were like bugs in the new software.
But the objects were soon confirmed visually by both Iris sensors and then later, like actual visually with eyes. And they weren't just a blip on the radar because of these different modes of actually seeing these objects. And again, this was seen multiple times, and not just by graves, but by many, many pilots. And from the radar they could tell where it was, its direction in its speed, but not necessarily its shape.
And on certain sightings they would see this thing traveling up and down, left and right, meandering and very odd ways that planes just or jets can't fly in. And it had no visual propulsion system, so no engines. And I don't think wings, I don't think they saw like wings either. And sometimes it would appear motionless even in category four hurricane speed winds. So that's like 130 miles an hour, which you can't do. And then it would accelerate to supersonic speeds.
this also wasn't these weren't quick visual sightings either. These things would be in the air all day. Meanwhile, modern jets with the US military, they have to go refuel, and these things would still be out there flying. They only saw them over water. And there was also a near air collision with a jet, which adds an extra layer of authenticity to it. And I'm actually going to have you read a quote.
So this is in that email, the first little thing I sent you, this is a quote from graves from I do believe this is from the congressional hearing itself. So when you're ready, carry. Yikes. Indeed. Yeah. And graves is very. I love this guy because he. He's exactly what you'd want from a witness. He has a great educational background. He's a pilot. He he's not like, hey, it's little green men flying things. He's like, we don't know what this is.
And we need to track this and report it and be able to talk about it, because it could be a national security issue. It could be dangerous for commercial flights and military flights. So that's one of the reasons why he started his organization to report these things. And I love the cube. It's like just so weird. But what was it? A clear sphere and a cube inside a clear sphere.
Yeah. And and also mentioned when they seen these things, they were different shapes and sizes almost every time they saw it. And they were usually these like a long gated shapes. But I love the specificity of a gray cube inside a clear sphere. And he's also said this is a quote from him as well. If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it's an issue for science. In either case, it's a concern for safety of flight. And I completely agree.
And that's where even someone like me, it's like a UFO is unreal. I'm like, well, wait, what are these things that we should feel? We should figure this out. Yeah. And yeah. So that's one of the reasons why I love that story. It's just it seems very authentic. And Ryan Graves himself seems like a really stand up dude. So our next story, we're going to go to a flight from Saudi Arabia to Abuja, Nigeria. Nigeria. And this is a name I am not going to pronounce correctly.
I'm just going to I've tried I've looked it up. I can't even really confirm a proper way to say it. So apologies all around. But this is a commercial pilot experience from captain Ruud van panga Memon ping amendment. Yeah, it sounds like a mumbling but that's that's what it's spelled like. And he was flying on a Boeing 747. And you can look this guy up Captain Rude, I'll have links.
But he is a prominent TikToker and YouTuber and Instagram guy, and he basically like films his days as a pilot, all of his videos are very normal. That really fun. You get to see what it's like to be a commercial pilot, waking up early and getting on big planes and all that kind of stuff. But one video he has shows some weird things in the sky, and it's like an hour or so into his video because he was filming his whole day, and this happened when he was actually, you know, in the air one night.
So it was around 5 a.m., and the captain saw something and captured it on his camera that he was filming for social media. right in the middle of the flight, he noticed this star like object. But the star, instead of twinkling gently in the sky, it began to dance in the sky and it would change altitude quickly. Drop down, move up, go back to its initial position, and then it would change course and fly somewhere else randomly before disappearing. And this behavior is not like a plane.
It's not like a weather balloon. It's not definitely not a satellite. So he isn't sure what it was. And both the pilot and his copilot saw these lights, and they claimed to have seen four objects in the sky doing this, it did not appear on radar, which is also an important piece of information, because if it was a plane, it would show up on their radar. And I'll add the video itself. It's kind of hard to see these things. Like I didn't see four lights.
I think I just saw like a few, but that's because of the way the camera set up. And it's also a camera filming into a dark sky, so it's not going to pick up the image as clearly as his eyes were in person. But it's still very interesting, and it's still tens of thousands of feet in the air doing very strange things. And I'll add this to and this is sort of tied into to Ryan Graves and everything else we're talking about as well.
But pilots, pilots typically don't share their stories because of this historical stigma around it. And that's what I think is really neat about what graves has been doing. And even this Captain Rude, as I'll call him, posting this video and he's gets comments on his YouTube video, I've read a lot of the comments where people are like, thank you for posting this.
Like, thank you for not hiding it or being worried that you're going to come off as some psycho weirdo person and just sharing it as part of your daily video. And then people will share things of like, my uncle's a pilot, and he saw some weird stuff too, and he didn't believe in any of it, but he couldn't explain this one thing. And so people are, like, sharing stuff, Of course. Yeah. And there's. No. And there's fear of, like, backlash.
Like getting fired or not promoted or, you know, and or you're just other pilots not trusting you and thinking you're weird. And so I do think the world is changing, especially since, like, Congress has, has had hearings on the issue and some other politicians have put, you know, bills together trying to like, have studies done and things. So I think it's becoming more mainstream and okay to talk about these things.
And again, just because we don't know what it is so we don't have to jump to conclusions. We can just be like, there's some weird shit happening. So yeah. Exactly. No, not at all. None at all. So this next account is from 2018, and I can't find the names of the pilots, but I like this account because it involves two different airlines. So two different sets of pilots experiencing the same thing, which makes it all the more interesting.
And this is on February 24th, 2018, when an air traffic controller in Albuquerque, New Mexico, received a call from a pilot on a Learjet flight in. This is a scene we're going to do. Okay. So this is in the email. Why don't you read the two pilots and I'll read the stage direction and the, air traffic controller said, okay, Wait a second. I have to pull up the email to and I don't have it written down there. All right.
this is an air traffic controller receiving a call from a pilot on a Learjet flight. No. Why do you ask? that unidentified object was headed in the direction of another flight, American Airlines flight 1095. So the controller radioed that plane. American 1095, this is air traffic control. Let us know if anything passes over you in the next 15 miles. Affirmative. We had an aircraft in front of you that reported something pass over.
And, we didn't have any targets, so just, let us know if you see anything pass over you. Minutes later, the pilot radioed control. Yeah. And some of that is a quote from the the article I read. And that's the that's the conversation that happened. So we don't have a lot of details about what exactly this was. I think it was too fast. But again, it wasn't showing up on radar, air traffic control or the planes.
Apparently it was going too fast to be a plane, and they have no idea what this thing was. Yes. Yeah. Of course. Of course it is. And it's so funny that I'm the one that's going to steer this conversation back a different way. But that also doesn't mean that it isn't something unworldly. Like it could be an enemy drone or a spy or a weather balloon. And sometimes when they do research these things, that actually sometimes does happen, especially weather balloons.
That actually is a very real thing. It's not just made up stories to try to explain away a UFO that does happen, and people do misinterpret what that is in the sky, but we don't know what this stuff is. So it really could be something else. And I know there's a lot of theories out now that like, oh, it's not all aliens. Some of this could be interdimensional travel or time travel, which, you know, I, I don't put a lot of stock into, but it is it is very interesting indeed. ocean.
Right, Which is also fascinating. And actually I'm going to skip ahead. I'm going to come back to the next story I was going to do, because you mentioned that I'm going to go to one of the most famous UFO sightings ever to take place, because it has video associated with it that I think is just super bizarre and weird. And if you look up anything on UFOs, even if you don't, you've seen these videos. But this is the famous Tic TAC incident. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Okay, so the reason I, I'm going to bring this up now because you mentioned the the underwater potential of like where these crafts are coming from. And that kind of ties into this. So off the coast of San Diego in 20 a this came to light in 2012, 2015. But the story actually happened in 2004. And this was with a carrier group off of San Diego, California. It involves a pilot named David Fravor, and he was working on a training exercise.
He was a Navy pilot, but they were working on a training exercise with marine pilots. And around noon or 1 p.m. on this day, they they took off. And so it's David Fravor and a wing man, two jets. But they were also with two other jets from the marine flights. And they're in the air and they get a control call from control saying that they have to cancel the training exercise because they have a quote unquote, real world vector.
And so that means something is like in the vicinity, and the jets are sent out to see what this is. So they're sent out a further 60 miles out to sea. They have no idea what they're intercepting, or at least David doesn't at all. And they're told that, the control sort of informs him that there's been these strange objects that they've been seeing for a few weeks that's coming and going. So something is weird. Weird is going on.
They don't know what it is, and they want the pilots to investigate it. Since they're out there, David assumes that there must be a drug runner. You know, because you're near the coast or near the coast. You're near the border there. There are drug runners that come in boats and subs and everything else. And so he and his wingman, they get into range of whatever this is they're supposed to look for.
And he notes that it was calm weather, very calm seas, but yet in the water he sees what he calls a giant T shape.
And it's essentially like if you look at the ocean from above and you see breakwater where there shouldn't be breakwater, and usually it's an island or a boat, but that's what he's seeing is breakwater, where there shouldn't be any breakwater, but there's no island and no boat or even he even thought it could have been a helicopter low to the water and creating disturbance, but they're too far away from the carrier for it to be a helicopter.
And he also doesn't see any rotors or a helicopter itself. It's just sort of a disturbance in the water. And right above that disturbance, he sees what he called the tic TAC object, or what we call the tic tac shaped object, and it's just above that disturbance. And again, no rotors, no engine. He estimates it could be about 40ft long and they start circling it. And as he descends and starts to come up to this thing, the tic TAC object turns and it mirrors David's movements.
So they almost get in this like circular pattern with this object. And, David is a few thousand feet above it. He aggressively tries to get closer and accelerates and goes down to it. And as he does that, the object then accelerates and just disappear. It goes so fast it disappears into view. And as he points out, we have some very fast jets and things. Nothing goes that fast to disappear that quickly that I don't think that's when the video was.
I think it's a later experience with another pilot that saw the same thing. I think that's the famous video is a different pilot from later, but the same group in the same situation and possibly the same object. And the video everybody can look this up at a video. It's essentially a Tic TAC looking object and you see like a tracking camera saying from a jet following this and you see the the video changes. It's like the object is white because it's air. So the white means it's hot.
So it's a hot thing in the thing. But then it changes to being completely black. And that's because the pilots were changing the modes of their sensors, and they were doing that to try to look closer. So different modes allow you to sort of zoom in and see better. And they're also just trying to figure out what it is. They're looking at it through every mode, and it makes the video kind of change how it's set up. And they just track this object, it flies around.
It kind of like shifts in the air while it's moving, like it almost turns on a dime, which is really interesting. And then it accelerates and flies out of out of view. And according to the pilots, the way it flew out of view is far faster than any manmade aircraft. So it is a very bizarre experience. I didn't realize it was like multiple sightings. I always thought that was one night with one video, but no, it was like multiple times that people saw this thing.
And also they did go back to the disturbance in the water and it was gone. There was no more break water in the, in the ocean in that, in that spot. Yeah. Yeah. My honest reaction, I'll tell you this is this is a progression, Kerry. I in especially like if I look back to my episode with you, which is like a year or more ago when the camps are. Yeah. I was very much like, look, we're going to look at this historical account. I like to go see what the original stories were.
All of the original stories of Kenneth Arnold make me think he didn't see a UFO. Like that's the reality of it. And just over time, it spins. The reason I picked these stories is because I am starting to open up to just be like, oh, I don't understand what's out there as much as I thought I did. And I like these stories because they are more modern. Again, they're associated with videos that are not a grainy, weird, you know, like fake thing.
This is like a military video, as with this example specifically. And so my my reaction now isn't I definitely don't jump to okay, there's some extraterrestrial type of thing. I'm just like, oh, there's there's stuff out there. And I have I have no idea. And my, my opinion honestly kind of changes day to day right now. And I still don't know much about this topic. Like, I, I'm so focused on my usual interest in the strange and mysterious.
It's like murder mysteries and historical mysteries and lost treasures. I don't read a lot about UFOs, and I'm trying to do that. I'm trying to educate myself more. And so when you talk about the study of strange, my podcast, it really is me learning. I'm not trying to necessarily teach people about things. I'm trying to learn about these things at the same time. And that's a very long winded answer to your question, but hopefully that that answers that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
And you didn't get to hear it because I recorded it separately. But I have an intro to today's episode where I talk about the the odds of us coming across another intelligent species in the universe is very, very, very low. The universe is so big. And it's like, you know, trying to find a pebble of sand on Earth, you know, it's so tough. So the odds are against us, but yet we don't know a lot. Like we still know so little about how the how the universe operates.
And and that's kind of where my brain goes trying to explain these things of like, we still have so much to go in our own understanding. So even though the universe is vast, there could be something about the way the universe works that we don't understand. That kind of actually makes it smaller and easier for intelligent species to travel or communicate or whatever.
So yeah, it's really it's really a fascinating topic, which is, again, while I'm kind of doing this, as, as we do get better about this. And as we are more open to adjust as a society to hearing stories about unidentified things, whether they be flying in the ocean, monsters in the woods, whatever they may be, because of technology. Now, in the acceleration over the last few years of AI, it's also going to be harder to figure out what's real when you see something.
And and that's really that's been a topic. I don't know where to go with that yet, but it really fascinates me because of my interest in this stuff and having a show, I get sent things usually by my brother, but also from just listeners of the show of like, oh my God, did you see this? They like discovered giant bones in the ground. And I'll look at it.
And I think because I have experience in film and special effects and stuff, I will usually be able to see something and be like, oh, that's I like you just fell for an AI video.
And even one just a few days ago, there was an announcement where someone said that they've used some sort of new radar to see under the Great Pyramids and that it, like, goes down thousands of feet and there's tunnels and stuff and, literally almost as soon as that announcement was made, there was a video out of people underneath the the pyramid and seeing these like, ancient towers and things underground, and it's all fake. But for a split second, I thought it was real.
And it was like, oh my God, they're down there. So it's just going to be really hard. And that's again, kind of why I like these stories that I'm sharing today. Is they all before that AI revolution. But yeah, it's going to be hard. And we all have to do a good job trying to figure out what's real or what's not with, that kind of content. Yeah. All right, so I have one more story if I can find it. There it is. So this involves a commercial pilot from the Netherlands.
Again, a name I'm going to butcher and I. I apologize to everybody in the world about how well I cannot pronounce names today, but this is from Christian Van Harvest. And he has thousands of hours of flight experience. He's seen a lot of weird stuff and written about it online. But he does claim that about 99% of it is probably all very, very explainable. But one small story of his stood out to me.
And that's in 2010, Christian was flying from Amsterdam to Spain, and he was at around 41,000ft when he saw something. And he had the awareness to take a picture of this. And he shared the photo with The Sun newspaper specifically is where I found this, and it appears to be a cigar shaped flying object. And he said he flew near the thing, watching it for about an hour, and it was roughly 100 nautical miles ahead of his plane. Air traffic control said there was no other aircraft in the area.
They had no sighting of this thing on radars or anything else, and it at one point it appeared to be very large and stationary and just kind of hanging in the sky. And to me the picture looks like a jet at a distance.
But he was watching this thing for an hour, and I think the reason this stood out to me, to be very honest, is this winter, my family and I, we took a vacation flying east and somewhere of, like, the middle of America, where there's probably, like the southwest because there were mountains and things out the window. So I saw this long cigar shaped object, and it looked like it was just hanging in the air and it had no wings. And I said, oh, this is it. I finally am seeing it.
I'm like, super excited that I'm seeing. So I can't explain in the sky. And it looks like it's just hanging there. And then our plane turned slightly and the angle, the difference suddenly it made it aware that this object was another plane and it was just kind of flying a little bit parallel to us. And it does make me say that, hey, look, it's very easy to misinterpret something you see in the sky because that's very obviously a plane, but just at the right angle. It didn't look like one.
And I think because we were both flying parallel, it looked stopped like it literally like dead in the air. And so that's what I first thought when I read this story. But then he said, followed it for an hour and I'm like, okay, now, now things are getting a little odd because over that hour, the flight path should change slightly. You get a different angle of it. And he also said that it again appeared to be staging light or motionless at a period of time during this whole flight.
So, it was just a weird story that I really like, and I like that it's a guy that's willing to share the story, and he's talked a lot about how he's seen other weird stuff, but most of it's probably explainable. And this one, though, seems, unexplainable. I guess. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so, and yeah, I think it's the time it just in my mind of following something for an hour where he's really looking at it and. Yeah, that is, it's super strange.
Now, I wish I had answers to all this stuff. I wish I could explain away some of these stories, but I really, really can't. And I think we've said it a million times. So I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but like, to me, this just means we have to keep watching the skies and we have to notate these things and try to if everybody's got a good camera nowadays. So film things, put it up there.
Even though there's a lot of videos that I think are terrible with the UFO world, but still film things, try to catch it and I guess have an open mind. Yeah. Any other thoughts? Carrie, how many UFOs have you seen in the last week? Oh, nice. Yeah. I, I didn't purposely take a break from social media, but I feel like I'm on it less, which is nice. It's nice. Yeah. It is, it is. And I feel like your brain kind of finds other things to focus on which are more productive. Yeah, well, good for you.
Well, thank you so much for doing this episode again. It's a topic I'm trying to understand better and learn about and not be afraid to talk about it. I'm still very intimidated to talk about these things. So I appreciate you being here with me for moral support and, and your insights. All right. Thank you so much, I'll talk to you soon.
Thank you for listening to what I think is a rather unique episode of A Study of Strange, and if you enjoy strange mysteries, join our Substack subscribers, get episodes early and additional content, and it's a great way to support the show. You can find that information through our support tab on our website. A study of strange.com. Thank you and good night.